Genre research

Quirky, Art house films.

An art film is typically a serious, noncommercial, independently made or a foreign language film that may have these qualities, but may have been made by a major company in its home territory and achieved popular success. It may thus be aimed at a niche audience, rather than a mass audience, or the use of subtitles in foreign language films may limit audience appeal.
Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an “art film” by those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films.” "Art cinema itself is a genre, with its own distinct conventions."- David Bordwell. Art film producers usually present their films at specialty "arthouse cinemas" and film festivals. The term "art film" is much more widely used in the United States than in Europe, where the term "art film" is more associated with " national cinema"
Art films are aimed at small niche market audiences, which means they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely-released mainstream blockbuster films.
Furthermore, a certain degree of experience and intellect are required to understand or appreciate such films; This contrasts sharply with mainstream "blockbuster" movies, which are geared more towards pure entertainment. For promotion, art films rely on the publicity generated from film critics' reviews, discussion of their film by arts columnists, commentators, and bloggers, and "word-of-mouth" promotion by audience members. Since art films have small initial investment costs, they only need to appeal to a small portion of the mainsteam viewing audiences to become financially viable.
Art House films are those of a high intellectual content that do not have a wide distribution.

Art films were also influenced by films by Spanish avant-garde creators such as Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí.
In the 1920s, film societies began advocating the notion that films could be divided into an "...entertainment cinema directed towards a mass audience and a serious art cinema aimed at an intellectual audience". In England, Alfred Hitchcock and Ivor Montagu formed a Film Society and imported films that they thought were "artistic achievements," such as "Soviet films of dialectical montage.

The 1960s was a crucial time in art film, giving rise to the European art cinema. The early 1960s saw the release of a number of groundbreaking films. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) used innovative visual and editing techniques such as jump cuts and hand-held camera work. Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1967) shocked audiences with its masochistic fantasies about floggings and bondage. Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow (1969), about a man who becomes insane after the death of his beloved cow, sparked the new wave of Iranian cinema.

In the early 1970s, directors shocked audiences with violent films such as Stanley Kubrick's brutal exploration of futuristic youth gangs in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and sexually-explicit and controversial films such as Bernardo Bertolucci's taboo-breaking Last Tango in Paris (1972). Another feature of 1970s art films was the return to prominence of bizarre characters and imagery, which abound in the tormented, obsessed title character in cult films such as Alejandro Jodorowky's psychedelic The Holy Mountain (1973) about a footless, handless dwarf and an alchemist seeking the mythical Lotus Island.

In 1980, director Martin Scorsese shocked audiences who had become used to the escapist blockbuster adventures of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas with the gritty, harsh realism of his film Raging Bull. Robert De Niro took method acting to an extreme to portray a boxer's decline from a prizewinning young fighter to an overweight, "has-been" nightclub owner. Other directors in the 1980s chose a more intellectual path, exploring philosophical issues. Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron (1981) is a critique of the Polish communist government which won the 1981 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Meanwhile, in the UK, Channel 4, a new television channel, financed in whole or part many films released theatrically via its Film4 subsidiary.

In the 1990s, some directors created bizarre, surreal alternate worlds, as was done in the 1980s with Blue Velvet and The Cook, the Thief, His wife & Her Lover. A number of films from the 2000s with art film qualities were notable due to their use of innovative filmmaking or editing techniques. Ethernal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is a romance film directed by Michel Gondry about a man who hires a company to erase the memory of a bad relationship. The film used a range of special effect techniques and camera work to depict the destruction of the man's memories and his transitions from one memory to another. Several 2000s-era films explored the theme of amnesia or memory, but unlike Memento, they did so using narrative techniques rather than filmmaking and editing methods.

These show a development in arthouse films during time the storylines became more complex, the editing and camera work developed a lot to show bizarre effects. Arthouse films are all have exceptional genre, that can’t be put under one a genre. The arthouse title refers to this kind of weird, not every day style. As the films mentioned before have all different mood, it can be dark and something that makes you think, or happy and romantic etc. The similarity in all is the intellectual content, which people have to learn to appreciate. The special care at making, to pay attention on the tiniest details, hairstyles, colours and clothes, make up, face expressions, everything has to be perfect. There is not a recipe for these details of costumes, because all arthouse films are different depending on the mood the director want to create.