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Art Film and Cinema

poppymiddlemas
Oct 21, 2016
2 min read

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.” ― Slavoj Žižek

Film is something I am inherently passionate about. I will never not be enthralled by film whether it be Art Films or Cinematic Epics. Art Film began with revolutionary propaganda in Russia using montage editing to create epic films of celebration. In England, Directors like Alfred Hitchcock were at the forefront of British cinema. He also started the Film Society that imported foreign art films that showcased Expressionism. In the 1950's the French New Wave cinema was born which put forward youthful spirit and rejected the classical cinematic tropes. However, by the 1960's the term Art Film had changed and was used in the US to describe films that were of a sexual nature or foreign B Movies rather than Independent artistic films like Hitchcock's works or Art House films.

In 2007, Professor Camille Paglia argued in her article "Art movies: R.I.P." that "aside from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, ...there is not a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's The Seventh Seal or Persona ". She argued that the young people in the 2000's don't have the patience to sit through long scenes filled up with nothing like the art films of the 1920's.

The 2010's has seen the reemergence of the Art-Horror film with example like Black Swan by Darren Aaronofsky, Stoker by Park Chan-Wook, the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy, and the popular horror film It Follows by David Robert Mitchell. This in particular is the most interesting genre to me surrounding art films as well as cinema. I think because a lot of these films draw from the previous art films from the 1960's and the real life happenings of the 1970's and 80's, especially in America and across the US.

I have previously made a couple of 2 minute films in my A Levels and in Second year of Uni tried to express myself through filming myself and then taking stills from those films and in turn making drawings from those images.