The serial

While genres implicitly rely on an audience’s interest in and familiarity with earlier movies of a certain kind, the serial is a type of movie that explicitly requires an audience to return episode after episode. Also called the chapter-play or cliff-hanger, the serial flourished in the days of silent films, when moviegoing was a weekly habit. Perhaps the most famous were Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14) and Judex (1916) in France and the American series of the same period with Pearl White, such as The Perils of Pauline. Old serials were revived from the 1960s onward as period pieces of popular art, with their improbable plots, exaggerated acting, and old-fashioned decor appealing to modern, sophisticated audiences. The French director Georges Franju made a modern pastiche Judex in 1963. In the late 1970s and ’80s new serials appeared in the form of multiepisode sagas shown on television. Roots (1977) in the United States had its counterpart in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 16-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which aired in installments on German television and then played as a serial in art houses around the world.

Films of art and the art cinema

For want of a better term, interpretation may be used to describe the type of motion picture in which a play, a ballet, an opera, or some other work of another art form is kept virtually intact and recorded by the camera and microphone. Adaptations of novels or plays re-create the work in motion-picture form, but interpretations merely give the performance a wider audience. The English director Tony Richardson’s version of Hamlet (1970) is an example of such a filmed record of a theatrical performance. Most motion pictures of operas and ballets may be classified as interpretations. Public and cable television became sponsors and disseminators of this type of film in the last quarter of the 20th century, although some interpretations, including Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), and numerous films of rock concerts thrived in theatrical distribution.

At one time the recording of an already established work of art was deemed “uncinematic” and thought to be a doubtful use of the medium. Such arguments were made as early as 1911 in response to the French Film d’Art company, which photographed high-class stage plays. During the second half of the 20th century, however, imaginative and innovative cinematic techniques were employed to record operas, ballets, and stage plays. The complexity of the resulting hybrid works, such as Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron as filmed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (1975), made the validity of the early generalizations questionable. Important filmmakers, including Robert Altman in the United States, Eric Rohmer in France, and Carlos Saura in Spain, turned in the last decades of the 20th century to the filming of works of other art forms as a means to open up the motion picture to new types of experiences.

The motion-picture recording of the acknowledged artistic successes of other media raises the important issue of the artistic stature of the cinema. As early as 1920 an audience of film connoisseurs could be identified in Europe. Ever since that time it has been possible to divide the cinema audience of any nation into a mass audience that seeks entertainment and a smaller group that is consciously concerned with artistic values in the motion picture. The films that appeal to these two groups, however, vary from one nation to another and from one period to another. The Hollywood comedies of the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others, for example, were originally popular entertainment, but they were later taken up by the art-film audience. The comedies of Jerry Lewis received little serious critical attention in their native United States but a great deal in France. The low-budget thrillers of directors who were adopted by auteur critics met a similar experience. The distinction between popular entertainment and high art seems indisputable in most instances, but confusions of fashion and conflicts in artistic standards resulting from experiment and change make it difficult to generalize about them.

Although there may be disagreements over what constitutes cinematic art, certain institutions have developed that foster the art of film. In the United States after World War II, “art houses” catered to sophisticated audiences in large cities, screening primarily European films, such as those directed by Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel, and Antonioni. The distribution of 16-mm films to museums and college campuses sparked interest in avant-garde films as well. In one sense, art films represent a genre; the audience that seeks them out has precise expectations that producers have been known to exploit. In 1951 Daiei films of Japan, for example, expressly aimed to conquer the export market by winning awards at international festivals. The company, which generally produced cheap domestic genre motion pictures, reserved a portion of its budget to make lavish historical spectacles, such as Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), that would appeal to the art audience outside Japan. The art film usually cannot be characterized in advance, however; it does not follow prescribed conventions but prides and sells itself on its uniqueness or distinctiveness.