An art and an industry

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995 by Peter Schepelern

In the 1960s film art broke new ground, but remained within the popular mainstream. The French New Wave films by the humanist Francois Truffaut, the misanthropic Claude Chabrol and the radical Jean-Luc Godard, and films such as Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad and Ingmar Bergman's Persona were works that marked a new modernism. Unlike earlier avant-garde works, however, they were seen by a wide general public. Film had finally gained acceptance as an artistic medium.

Great films, contrary to other art forms, often transcend the conventional distinction between low and high culture. Virtuoso Hollywood pieces such as Ernst Lubitsch's erotic comedies, John Ford's westerns, Max Ophuls' melodramas and Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers contain no literary profundities, but seen as visual art, as examples of pictorial story-telling, they established a new concept of film culture. Reluctantly the bastions of high culture have come to realize that film as a medium has its own value.

Peter Schepelern, of Denmark, is a professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at the University of Copenhagen. He has written several books on film theory and film history and contributed film criticism to various periodicals.