Arthouse cinema
A cinema , also cinema theater or art house is a movie theater , the films mainly outside the mainstream shows. Art house cinemas sprang up on the east coast of the United States in the late 1920s . Art house cinemas were particularly popular in the major cities of the United States ; by 1960 there were about 500 such facilities there. Often they emerged from non-commercial film clubs . Today the term arthouse is used colloquially as an antithesis to the mainstream .
The cinema program was shaped by a mainly academic audience that yearned for films beyond American studio productions. In art house cinema, many different currents come together, which often overlap in terms of content. The core is the avant-garde film , which endeavors to further develop the art form and has an experimental character. European films in particular found their way into the art house because they differed in principle from American productions due to a different narrative tradition. Selected films were also shown again as part of retrospectives . In the 1970s and 1980s, the arthouse cinemas established themselves as venues for independent and underground film , and from then on also in Europe as a response to attempts by the traditional cinema industry to withhold current programs from smaller cinemas. The thus created cinemas are - compared to other movie theaters - from the rental strategy and the requirements of the film distributors independent.
In Germany, the share of amounts cinemas at the cinema market today about 17 percent; in other European countries such as France or Switzerland up to 30 percent. In the past, many were cinemas in Germany since 1953 in the Guild of German Art House Cinemas and since 1972 the AG Kino organized. In 2003, both associations merged to form the working group Kino - Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater .
In contrast to the non-commercial local cinemas that are funded usually by the public sector, are cinemas private organization. The programming must therefore be economical and cannot be based solely on cinematic criteria. Many art house cinemas are therefore run by non-profit associations whose employees work on a voluntary basis.
literature
- Gregory A. Waller (Ed.): Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition. Blackwell, Malden, Mass. 2002, p. 233 ff.
- Barbara Wilinsky: Sure seaters: the emergence of art house cinema. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2001.
- Hans-Jürgen Tast: Cinemas in the 1980s. Example: Berlin / West. Schellerten 2008, ISBN 978-3-88842-035-1 .
Web links
- www.agkino.de - Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kino – Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater e. V.
- www.programmkino.de - cinema magazine for the German art house, art film and art house cinemas
- Arthouse , Art House and cinema in the lexicon of film terms. (formerly Bender-Verlag, now at the Institute for Modern German Literature and Media at the University of Kiel )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b James zu Hüningen, Vinzenz Hediger , Patrick Vonderau: Art house . In: Hans Jürgen Wulff (Hrsg.): Lexicon of film terms.