Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
The extended definition of art cinema marks off films
that can be differentiated from commonplace entertainment cinema in terms of source material and
intended audience. Alongside such popular genres of
early cinema as actualities, trick films, chase films, and
comedies were brief films drawn from the traditional
elements of ‘‘high culture,’’ that is, adaptations from
classic drama and literature and films based on historical
events. This dimension of the art film emerged most
forcibly in France during the years before World War I,
with films from the appropriately titled Le Film d’Art
company, and there were equivalent trends in Germany
and Italy. At this time, the contours of the art film begin
to form in terms of its relationship to orthodox and
established high culture—literature, history, and the fine
arts—together with the aspiration on the part of producers to attract a more ‘‘respectable’’ and educated
audience than the urban working classes that patronized
the nickelodeons. Art cinema’s project was the transformation of a cultural phenomenon with origins in fairgrounds, vaudeville theaters and music halls, and
improvised screening venues, into a cultural activity comparable to the established art forms.
However, the most important phase in the early
history of art cinema was the 1920s. The major
European film industries had been severely effected by
World War I, and Hollywood had established itself as the main provider of entertainment cinema in many parts of
the world. In the course of reconstructing their film
industries, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union, in
particular, created a diverse range of cinemas, making
films that differed in key respects from the Hollywood
films that filled European screens. Such films reflected
an attempt to establish alternatives to the evolving
Hollywood cinema of stars and genres and were recognized by intellectuals and artists in such metropolitan
centers of culture as Berlin, Paris, London, and New York as art films. These countries did have their equivalents to the American entertainment films, but the art
strands represented distinctive approaches to filmmaking
that were aligned with the modernist and avant-garde
artistic currents of the time: expressionism, surrealism,
dadaism, and constructivism. In France, such films as
La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame
Beudet, 1923), Me ´nilmontant (1926), and La Coquille et
le clergyman, (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928)
deployed a range of techniques to represent the inner
psychological life of their protagonists, while such filmmakers as Rene´ Clair (1898–1981) with Entr’acte (1924),
and Salvador Dali (1904–1989) and Luis Bun˜uel
(1900–1983) with Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian
Dog, 1929) defied the narrative logic of mainstream
Hollywood films. The German film acquired an international prominence with the appearance of Das Kabinett
des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), a
self-consciously artistic film that combined the psychological qualities associated subsequently with the French
films with an approach to mise-en-sce `ne influenced by
expressionist drama and painting. Though most
German films during the period were commercial genre
pieces, historical spectaculars, and thrillers, the handful of
expressionist films that followed The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari have imprinted themselves on film history
as founding examples of art cinema both through their
eccentric style and their international circulation through
specialized cinema clubs and societies. In particular, the
other important art cinema of the 1920s came from the
Soviet Union, where Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and
Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) made formal and narrative innovations in terms of montage. Such films as
Bronenosets Potyumkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925),
Oktyabr (Ten Days That Shook the World and October,
1927), and Mat (Mother, 1926) also injected a political
edge into the art film. In economic terms, art films were
financed from a mixture of sources including the state
itself in the case of the Soviet film, large commercial concerns such as Germany’s Univesum Film
Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa), smaller specialist firms, and private financing by the filmmakers themselves or by wealthy
patrons. In 1920, the German government instituted
financial incentives for exhibitors screening films with
artistic and cultural value, a move that many governments would later emulate in order to protect and foster
an indigenous cultural cinema.
The 1920s saw the establishment of a number of the
parameters for the art film, in particular its status as a
challenge artistically, culturally, and financially to the
Hollywood film, which had established itself as the exemplar of cinema in most countries of the world. The art
film presented a parallel experience—complex artistic
films instead of entertainment narratives, intimate screening venues instead of picture palaces, intellectual journals
instead of fan magazines—addressed to audiences familiar with modernist developments in literature, music, and
painting. The territory staked out by the art film of the
1920s was defined in the polarized terminology of ‘‘art
versus entertainment’’ and ‘‘culture versus commerce,’’
conceptual couplets that still inform thinking about the
medium.