An art film (also called an "art cinema", "art movie", or in the US, an "independent film" or "art house film") is a typically a serious, noncommercial, independently made film that is aimed at a niche audience, rather than a mass audience. Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an "art film" using a "...canon of films and those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films." Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (repertory cinemas, or in the US "arthouse cinemas") and film festivals.

The term "art film" is much more widely used in the United States than in Europe. In the US, the term is often defined very broadly, to include foreign-language (non-English) "auteur" films, independent films, experimental films, documentaries and short films. The term has been used loosely in the US since the 1960s and 1970s, when "art film" was a euphemism for racy Italian and French B-movies andsexually explicit European films such as I Am Curious (Yellow). In contrast, in Europe, the term "art film" is more associated with "auteur" films and "national cinema" (e.g., German national cinema).

The term "art film" is used in its loosest sense when the location of exhibition, the repertory theater or "arthouse cinema," is used to define which films are "art films." With this approach, a broad range of films, such as a 1960s Hitchcock movie, a 1970s experimental underground film, a 1980s European auteur film, and a 1990s US "Independent" film all fall under the rubric of "art film." In 2000, film theorist Robert Stam argued that "art film" was a film genre based on artistic status, in the same way that film genres can be based on aspects of films such as their budgets (blockbuster movies or B-movies) or their star performers (Fred Astaire movies).

Deviations From Mainstream Film Norms

Film scholar David Bordwell outlined the academic definition of "art film" in a 1979 article entitled The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice, which contrasts art films against the mainstream films of classical Hollywood cinema. Mainstream Hollywood-style films use a clear narrative form to organize the film into a series of "...causally related events taking place in space and time," with every scene driving towards a goal. The plot for mainstream movies is driven by a well-defined protaganist, fleshed out with clear characters, and strengthened with "...question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, (and) deadline plot structures." The film is then tied together with fast pacing, musical soundtracks to cue (or 'spoonfeed') the appropriate audience emotions, and tight, seamless editing. Mainstream films tend to use a small palette of familiar, generic images, plots, verbal expressions, and archetypal "stock" characters.

In contrast, Bordwell states that "...the art cinema motivates its narrative by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity" Art films deviate from the mainstream, "classical" norms of filmmaking in that they typically deal with more episodic narrative structures with a "...loosening of the chain of cause and effect." As well, art films often deal with an inner drama that takes place in a characters psyche, such as psychological issues dealing with individual identity, transgressive sexual or social issues, moral dilemmas, or personal crises. Mainstream films also deal with moral dilemmas or identity crises, but these issues are usually resolved by the end of the film. In art films, the dilemmas are probed and investigated in a pensive fashion, but usually without a clear resolution at the end of the movie. The protagonists in art films are often facing doubt, anomie or alienation, and the art film often depicts their internal dialogue of thoughts, dreams, and fantasies. In some art films, the director uses a depiction of absurd or seemingly meaningless actions to express a philosophical viewpoint such as existentialism.

The story in an art film often has a secondary role to character development and an exploration of ideas through lengthy sequences of dialogue. If an art film has a story, it is usually a drifting sequence of vaguely defined or ambiguous episodes. There may be unexplained gaps in the film, deliberately unclear sequences, or extraneous sequences that are not related to previous scenes, which force the viewer to subjectively make their own interpret of the film's message. Art films often "...bear the marks of a distinctive visual style" and authorial approach of the director. An art cinema films often refuse to provide a "...readily answered conclusion," instead putting the audience member the task of thinking about "...how is the story being told? Why tell the story in this way?"

Production and Distribution

Since art films are aimed at small niche market audiences, they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets. Art film producers with small budgets cannot make films with lavish production values, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, and huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely-released mainstream blockbuster films. However, art films make up for these constraints by creating a different type of film; art films often use lesser-known film actors (or even amateur actors) and modest sets to create a loose montage of pensive, reflective dialogue sequences. 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, art films only need to appeal to a small portion of the mainstream viewing audiences to achieve huge financial success. Many major motion picture studios have special divisions dedicated to art films, such as the Fox Searchlight division of Twentieth Century Fox, the Focus Features division of Universal, and the Sony Pictures Classics division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Sony Pictures Classics is a special division of Sony Pictures. Founded in 1992, Sony Pictures Classics produces, acquires and distributes independent films from America and around the world.

The most successful American producer and distributor of art films is Miramax Films, which began in 1979 as a studio for the distribution of independent films which were deemed commercially unviable at the major studios. In 1993, Miramax was purchased by Disney and subsequently expanded its library to include more commercial films such as She's All That, A View from the Top, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Miramax continued to emphasize less mainstream films, and produced more genre-oriented films like Scream and Spy Kids through its Dimension Films label. When Miramax founders Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein left Miramax in September 2005 to form The Weinstein Company, they took the Dimension label with them.

The directors in this list have made films that were deemed to be notable by prominent critics, film festivals, and/or books on the history of cinema. • Wes Anderson (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Fatih Akin (Audience Award at the European Film Awards)
• Robert Altman (Academy Award winner or Nominee) is a major influence on the development of the hyperlink movie.
• Paul Thomas Anderson (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Michelangelo Antonioni (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Darren Aronofsky (Independent Spirit Award Winner)
• Park Chan-Wook (Cannes Film Festival Winner)
• Ingmar Bergman (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Bernardo Bertolucci (Academy Award winenr or Nominee)
• Luis Buñuel (Won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival)
• Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Grand Jury Prize at Cannes)
• Francis Ford Coppola (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Sergei Eisenstein Russian Award Stalin Prizewinner
• Federico Fellini (Academy Award winer or Nominee)
• Paul Greengrass (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Michel Gondry (Academy Award wniner or Nominee)
• Werner Herzog (Alfred P. Sloan Prize: Sundance Film Festival)
• Hou Hsiao-Hsien ( Nominee at Cannes Film Festival)
• Peter Jackson (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Abbas Kiarostami (Palme d'Or, Cannes Festival)
• Krzysztof Kieslowski (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Takeshi Kitano (Takeshi's Castle)
• Akira Kurosawa (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Stanley Kubrick (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Emir Kusturica (Cannes Film Festival Winner)
• David Lynch (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Majid Majidi (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Cannes Film Festival Winer)
• Christopher Nolan (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Satyajit Ray -(Featured Article)Awards conferred on Satyajit Ray
• Adoor Gopalakrishnan Lifetime Achievement Award in Film awarded by the Government of India
• Martin Scorsese (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Mrinal Sen (Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters) the highest honor conferred by France
• Gus Van Sant (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Steven Soderbergh (Academy Award winner or Nominee) systematically defined and applied the basic rules of hyperlink cinema
• Alexander Sokurov, Russian Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences Nika Award
• Andrei Tarkovsky, He is generally regarded as the foremost important and influential filmmaker of the post-war Soviet era in Russia and one of the greatest in the history of cinema
• Quentin Tarantino (Academy Award winner or Nominee)
• Wong Kar-wai, (Best Director), Hong Kong Film Awards
• Zhang Yimou (Grand Jury Prize at Cannes)

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