Art Films

[Worm of Despite]

hmmm...i'm getting frustrated with myself here because i cant seem to get my argument across. or maybe im just being ignored .

Wasn't ignoring--just silently agreeing.

[Marv]

luci said;

Tazz...i can't imagine the person who would call YOU pretentious!!! you're a totally "down-to-earth" guy.
_________________

ha! ive noticed how certain errr...percieved irregularities of mine have brought much amusement.oh well, my own fault. pretentious? maybe i geuss. im not introspective enough to know. but i said i was wrong about avante garde didnt i? give me some credit.

[lucimay]

maybe i wasn't clear...i don't think you're being pretentious at all. i'm happy that you're engaging in this discussion. i'm interested in your opinion. i don't think you peculiar...you seem "regular" to me.

let me further state my view in case i've been ambiguous.

i think of "art films" or "art cinema" as a whole different genre than your average movie, even if that movie has been made by an "independant" film maker. i think that because i took a Film History class and our instructor differentiated. he used the term "avante garde" or "experimental" film to describe a genre of film that was a product intended for a diffferent audience altogether than the average joe on the street OR not made for an intended audience AT ALL, but for the sake of satisfying the artist's intention. an avante garde or experimental filmmaker is usually more interested in film as a medium...much like a painter uses paints, or a sculpter uses clay. most of those film makers average joes like ourselves have never even HEARD of. they've used their own money or equipment, or have gotten art grants from universities or other grant givers, etc. SOME of those guys have actually used the medium in such a way as to be innovative and have affected and influenced the mainstream film industry.
as i am at campus right now, i don't have access to my text for that class but when i get home, i will look up some of these names and post them for your perusal.

all other film is movies to me. i think all film is art as i have an idea how much creativity goes into a production of ANY film, whether made for mass consumption or not. that is MY subjective viewpoint. the degree of artistic merit in any given film is the subjective viewpoint of the viewer.
some movies are more artfully made than others. that's why i said, if you think it's art, it is.

and now that i've bored you all to tears...i think i'll go to class and learn about Gilgamesh!! heh.

[Avatar]

art film, while in many respects liberated from normal constraints HAS TO HAS TO HAS TO adhere to certain principles. namely, the originators of the film cannot in anyway be motivated by money, they cannot target a large audience and it has to be art for arts sake.

I certainly see what you're saying, but I think that a film can be art regardless of what the intentions were. Perhaps some simply become so by virtue of themselves, their content, or their impact.

Excellent post about the paintings Foul, and great post too LuciMay.

I dunnno, still thinking about this.

(And of course art films can have guns MM.)

What about Momento?

And one of my favourites has always been The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

--A

[sgt.null]

Kandinsky is an artist.
that guy doing Velvet Elvis ain't.

thank you and good night.

[matrixman]

let me further state my view in case i've been ambiguous.

Is it ever possible to be absolutely clear when discussing something as nebulous as art? And if the work of art itself (whether film or painting or whatever) has an absolutely clear message about something, then it must be...Propaganda art! Speaking of which, has anyone ever watched Leni Riefenstahl's groundbreaking and infamous Triumph of the Will, her film documentary of the Nazi rally at Nuremberg? I've never seen the whole thing, but enough to appreciate the kind of hypnotic power the film must have had on the German populace.

Going by your expanded defintion, Lucimay, I guess I've never seen a genuine art film, because the kind you're talking about has only ever been seen and circulated in universities and other ivory towers. In other words, it's an elitist thing, heh heh. It's probably for the best anyway.

I know that something like The Matrix will of course never be considered art by many people, both academics and general moviegoers. But that's their problem, not mine. I mentioned this film to see what kind of reaction I'd get.

For truly avant-garde stuff, I guess you can't beat obscure experimental films by university graduates.

[Avatar]

LuciMay promises a suitable rebuttal when she's awake again.

We missed you in Chat today MM.

--A

[High Lord Tolkien]

(I only clicked this thread because Tazzman mentioned it in another thread. Initial I had no interest in anything related to "art films" )


LM said it best: "crap".
Or at least that's the first word I think of when I hear "art films".
But what is an art film?
Very subjective as we've seen in this thread.

Most of the films nominated for various awards and winners at film festivals are movies I wouldn't pay a dime to see.
And most of these are considered "art films".
I've tried to watch some over the years and............


Now, I would consider Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon an art film that I enjoyed very much.
Why? I have no idea.

Does anyone else consider it an "art film"?

[Marv]

Now, I would consider Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon an art film that I enjoyed very much.
Why? I have no idea.

Does anyone else consider it an "art film"?

i think were growing towards a staple response here. its art, to whichever degree you choose, and then you have to decide on your distinction of an art film.

crouching tiger is one of the toughest to assess IMO because it derives from a very crowded far-east film market which, although ive seen a lot of chineese/japaneese cinema, i dont know in-side and out. crouching tiger could be simply the 'jurassic park' of far-east cinema. its hard to tell.

[lucimay]

let me further state my view in case i've been ambiguous.

Is it ever possible to be absolutely clear when discussing something as nebulous as art? And if the work of art itself (whether film or painting or whatever) has an absolutely clear message about something, then it must be...Propaganda art! Speaking of which, has anyone ever watched Leni Riefenstahl's groundbreaking and infamous Triumph of the Will, her film documentary of the Nazi rally at Nuremberg? I've never seen the whole thing, but enough to appreciate the kind of hypnotic power the film must have had on the German populace.

Going by your expanded defintion, Lucimay, I guess I've never seen a genuine art film, because the kind you're talking about has only ever been seen and circulated in universities and other ivory towers. In other words, it's an elitist thing, heh heh. It's probably for the best anyway.

I know that something like The Matrix will of course never be considered art by many people, both academics and general moviegoers. But that's their problem, not mine. I mentioned this film to see what kind of reaction I'd get.

For truly avant-garde stuff, I guess you can't beat obscure experimental films by university graduates.

okay okay....here's a page of text from my film history textbook "A Short History of The Movies" (eighth edition) Bruce Kawin & Gerald Mast.

The Independant American Cinema

The Independent American Cinema has been called by many names: the American Underground, the American Avant-Garde, the New American Cinema, and the Experimental American Cinema among them. By whatever name, an alternative cinema tradition has existed in the United States since the 1920's with a series of assumptions that differed markedly from those of the commercial American cinema. This cinema is highly personal and individual (often one person literally makes the entire film); like poetry, it has virtually no commercial aspirations; and it is necessarily revolutionary in structure, or visual technique, or intellectual attitude, or all three. These personal, experimental films first attracted wide attention in the late 1950's. Nevertheless, the American avant-garde, independant, poetic cinema was not particularly a 1950's or even a 1960's movement. Rather, a tradition of avant-garde filmmaking that had grown along with, and been influenced by, the avant-garde cinema of Europe since the 1920's, and that had its own major films and figures and movements all along, went throught a particularly creative phase just when public interest in film as an art was at its height.

There are three conflicting critical attitudes about the Independent American Cinema. For some, it represents the narcissistic visual scribblings of the luatic fringe whose work is ultimately irrelevant to the development of serious film art (that is, commercial, narrative, freature-length "art films"). In support of this postion, it is probably true that a vast majority of American filmgoers has never even heard of the most respected Independent filmmakers. A second postition finds the Independent American Cinema a fertile testing ground for techniques and devices that are later absorbed and practiced by the mainstream of filmmaking (that is, commercial, feature-length narrative films). In support of this postition one can point to the influence of the French avant-garde onthe later fearures of Clair, Epstein, Cocteau, and Bunuel (all of whom came out of the avant-garde), as well as the fact that many of the stylistic devices and moral attitudes of the commmercial films of the 1960's and 1970's (their sensuality, the use of slow motion, multiple exposure, accelerated motion, rock music, musique concrete, computer graphics, shock cutting, split screen) were first seen in Independent films.

Many of the experiments undertaken by New Wave directors were inspired by those they had seen in 1958 (at the Brussels World's Fair and, a week later, in Paris) at screenings of films by Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Jim Davis, Maya Deren, Ian Hugo, and others. More recently, the credits of SE7EN(1995) reflected the influence of Brakhage. Yet a third position finds the Independent American Cinema the only significant and serious works of film art in America. In support of this position, they observe that these are the only films free of commercial pressures, totally dependent on the vision of a single artist, and totally aligned with the parallel movements in modern painting, music, and poetry. The business of these independent films is perception: the way the devices of an art can aid, extend, and complicated one's ability to perceive inner and outer realities. That goal might be taken as the ultimate intention of all the Modernist arts.

Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren are the two mentioned who i found interesting filmmakers.

www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/anger.html


www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html

regarding Crouching Tiger...exceedingly artfully done. Hero is another that comes to mind!!! love Zhang Yimou.

regarding Leni's Triumph of Will...i will be seeing that this semester in my documentary film class!!

regarding The Matrix...brilliantly done. definitely art in my book, loved the first one...didn't care about the others.

[sgt.null]

is art by nature non comercial? the Mona Lisa seems to defy that explanation.

[lucimay]

is art by nature non comercial? the Mona Lisa seems to defy that explanation.

no...money has been impetus for some of the greatest works of art of our times so...
i can't argue that that has any bearing on it's artistic merit nor would i attmept to...

i can't place monitary value on art but i don't mind paying to see it either...

of course money facilitates art as artists need supplies...

[sgt.null]

patronage certainly. but that usually implies freedom. if the goverment contracts you, wouldn't that imply some sort of control on their part? how do the national endowments work?

[matrixman]

Thanks for the links, Lucimay. That is a terrific website! Anger's and Deren's films look to be very compelling, and I would love to see them, but as the profile on Deren notes:

Deren's writing remains relatively obscure in film theory and her films are rarely screened outside of experimental or feminist film courses.

I want to be clear that I'm not against art films. I was just uncertain about what criteria was being applied to define the term, and the bit you quoted from that film textbook has cleared things up a lot. I think we're all on the same page now.

I have in fact seen my share of "experimental" cinema. We have a great little local theatre called the Cinematheque independently run by the Winnipeg Film Group that showcases both Canadian and international non-mainstream movies, stuff that the multiplexes would never touch. I'm proud that we have an "art film house" like the Cinematheque and am grateful for the opportunity to view films whose mere existence would never have been known to me otherwise. That doesn't mean that every one I've seen is a work of utter genius. Some I'd say really were "crap." Some just made me doze off. So there are "good" and "bad" art films, just as there are good and bad commercially-oriented films - even if academic film theorists may sniff and say that avant-garde cinema is beyond such quaint and plebeian notions as "good movie" or "bad movie." That may or may not be so, but isn't it true that every time we sit through a movie -- whether it's a 10-minute short or a 3-hour epic -- we make a judgment as to whether or not that movie was worth our time? If the movie was deemed worthy our time, we would say it was "good." If it wasn't deemed so, we would say it was "bad." Or "#@$ crap!"

these are the only films free of commercial pressures, totally dependent on the vision of a single artist, and totally aligned with the parallel movements in modern painting, music, and poetry.

Now that statement strikes a chord with me, as I do have a passion for modern painting and music. Modern "serious" music by its nature will never achieve a wide audience; that is not its intent. I enjoy contemporary classical stuff from composers like Ligeti and Penderecki (among many) that may scare a lot of casual listeners away, although the music of these two should be familiar to anyone who has sat through Stanley Kubrick's films - specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining.

Being a huge Kubrick fan, it was nice to see him included in the Sense of Cinema website's profiles. While his films certainly weren't entirely free of commercial pressures, they were undeniably dependent on the vision of a single artist. As noted in the profile on him: "One knows, for the most part, that one is watching a Kubrick movie – its authorship is clear."

Wasn't 2001: A Space Odyssey essentially a big budget art film, the first of its kind? An avant-garde movie posited as a Hollywood feature? Does 2001 push the boundaries? Oh yes. Is it technically and visually stimulating? Hell, yes! Does it give you something to think about? Good lord, yes! (Heh, I think it fulfills Avatar's requirements.)

The business of these independent films is perception: the way the devices of an art can aid, extend, and complicated one's ability to perceive inner and outer realities. That goal might be taken as the ultimate intention of all the Modernist arts.

I agree with that.

I never did reply to the title question of this thread. Natural Born Killers: yes, I'd say it's an "art film" -- disguised as an "action film." Mind you, that could describe The Matrix, too. Or Sin City for that matter. Or Kill Bill. I could go on. Anyway, NBK was a movie that seemed to polarize people's views on cinematic violence the way Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange did in the 1970s. If one purpose of art is to force viewers out of their comfort zones, then I think these two films succeeded.

regarding Leni's Triumph of Will...i will be seeing that this semester in my documentary film class!!

Wish I could join you in that class.

[lucimay]

i'm so glad we didn't lose these posts. phew.

[Loredoctor]

Semper Edem.

[jacob Raver, sinTempter]

JFK is one of the best films ever made. Keeping that pacing with that level of underlying tension for that long...amazing.

[Montresor]

JFK is one of the best films ever made. Keeping that pacing with that level of underlying tension for that long...amazing.

I agree that it has an amazing sense of tension and pace, it's just a pity that the film so flagrantly fabricates its evidence and consistently lies when it comes to history and detail.