• Example: LA STRADA, 8 1/2, WILD STRAWBERRIES, The Seventh Seal, Persona, Ashes and Diamonds, Jules et Jim, Knife in the Water, Vivre Sa vie, Muriel
• “Art cinema” as a distinct mode of film practice
• TIME: the art cinema as a distinct mode appears after World War II when the dominance of the Hollywood cinema was beginning to wane.
• After 1954, films began to remade for international audiences.
• The later neo-realist film; New Wave,

• The classical narrative cinema (Hollywood since 1920): narrative structure, cinematic style, and spectatorial activity
• Salient features of the art cinema:

1. Art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode (especially against the cause-effect linkage of events)
2. Aart cinema motivates its narratives by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity.  (art cinema defines itself as a realistic cinema: show us the actual location and real problems) part of it is sexual. The art cinema uses: ‘realistic’ – that is, complex characters
3. The art cinema is classical in its reliance upon psychological causation; characters and their effects on one another remaining central. (lack defined desires and goals) types
4. The protagonist’s itinerary is not completely random.
5. A conception of realism also affects the film’s spatial and temporal construction but the art cinema’s realism here encompasses a spectrum of possibilities.
6. The art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the firm’s system.
7. Conventions: audiences expect stylistically instead of narration: technical touches and obsessive motifs

• Art cinema is not isolation from others
• It is related to the classical narrative cinema (interact)
• The art cinema represents the domestication of modernist filmmaking

Reference:

Bordwell, David. ’The Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice.’ in Catherine Fowler (ed.) The European Cinema Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 94-102