Introduction

Abstract

This book examines a subset of art films and filmmakers with an ambivalent relationship to the past and to the history of theatrical cinema. Historically, definitions of the art film depend on a basket of characteristics such as deviation from the mainstream through formal experimentation, provocative content, and “foreignness” with respect to local conditions and expectations and through insistence on authorship. The cinephile audiences of art cinema additionally assure viewer awareness of precursor texts, such that art-film auteurs are enabled to activate intertextual reference as part of the fundamental rhetoric of their films. This is especially true in the era of postmodernism, with an increased circulation of texts because of new technologies and changes in the media environment. Collectively these circumstances lead to a strain of the art film, sometimes elegiac in tone, that memorializes the past as it defines the present, with varying degrees of anxiety about the future.