You stumble on a movie that doesn’t quite fit the studio mold. Maybe it plays around with form, experiments with narrative, or prioritizes symbolism and images over plot. A quick way to describe the indescribable to someone else is to call it “arthouse.”
But the meaning of that term, much like the films it encompasses, isn’t so easy to pin down in one place. Let’s dig into the many facets of what arthouse really means.
The term “arthouse” typically describes films that are independently funded, foreign language, and/or experimental or surreal. The genre (if it can be called that) has its roots in the earliest days of the art form, when filmmakers of the French impressionist and German expressionism movements started to experiment with images and narrative in a way that went well beyond just telling a story. The torch was carried through the years by artists like:
- Federico Fellini (“La Dolce Vita,” “8 ½”)
- Agnès Varda (“La Pointe Courte,” “Cléo From 5 to 7”)
- Jean-Luc Godard (“Breathless,” “Pierrot le Fou”)
- Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (“House”)
- Akira Kurosawa (“Rashomon,” “Dreams”)
- Alejandro Jodorowsky (“El Topo,” “The Holy Mountain”)
- Andrei Tarkovsky (“Solaris,” “Stalker”)
- Terrence Malick (“The Tree of Life,” “To the Wonder”)
- David Lynch (“Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet”)
- Claire Denis (“Beau Travail,” “High Life”)
More recently, names like Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), Luca Guadagnino (“Queer”), and Robert Eggers (“Nosferatu”) have broken through, despite making challenging, experimental material. As you can tell from the wide range above, you can’t just take every indie movie, every film made outside your home country, and every story you find strange and stamp it as “arthouse.”
What makes an arthouse film?
For a film to earn the arthouse label, it needs to go against mainstream tastes in some way. That’s not to say that if studio movies are fun and easily digestible then arthouse fare is dour and difficult. However, we can see clear lines in how a studio-backed picture pursues narrative versus an arthouse feature.
Take, for example, two Oscar-nominated animated features from the same year: Chris Sanders’ “The Wild Robot” and Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow.” Both take place in a wilderness dominated by anthropomorphic animals as they navigate a world clearly damaged by human callousness. “The Wild Robot” is the mainstream version of this tale, packed with celebrity voice actors, big-budget animation, and a typical three-act structure, along with jokes, pathos, and other staples of American narrative cinema. By comparison, “Flow,” created entirely on the open-source 3D software Blender, has no dialogue and relies entirely on visuals to convey both the emotional stakes and world-building. Both films are terrific, but “Flow” is distinctly arthouse in its approach to the subject matter.
We must also be careful not to assume everything coming from an independent backer or a foreign-language studio automatically meets the definition of arthouse cinema. The 2002 rom-com “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was an independently financed production that arose out of writer and star Nia Vardalos’ one-woman monologue workshop. However, the stakes of the story—a woman trying to bridge her Greek culture to her fiancé’s WASP-y upbringing—are markedly mainstream. That’s not a mark against the film, but it’s also not difficult to see why it was a sleeper hit given the broad appeal of the narrative.
Arthouse and global cinema
The term becomes fuzzier when we approach foreign-language cinema. American audiences being comfortable with subtitles is a fairly newer phenomenon. Korean director Bong Joon Ho mentioned it as an obstacle as recently as 2020, when “Parasite” became the first foreign-language film in Oscars history to win best picture. For a long time, any film from another country where English wasn’t the primary language was typically relegated to arthouse cinemas, regardless of their broader appeal.
For example, Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful” both deal with the Holocaust. But because “Schindler’s List” came from one of America’s most celebrated directors and was largely in English, it was a mainstream hit. “Life Is Beautiful,” by comparison, was a hit by foreign-language film standards, but also never made it into anywhere near as many theaters as “Schindler’s List,” despite American audiences demonstrating they would show up for an acclaimed movie set in a concentration camp. “Life Is Beautiful” was an arthouse film more by virtue of distribution than by content.
Although American audiences still aren’t flocking to non-English language features, the success of a film like “Parasite” and the willingness to watch series like “Squid Game” shows a move away from lumping everything with subtitles into the same category.
Arthouse films at the box office
We can’t use box office as our sole metric of what constitutes arthouse cinema, especially in today’s market. While A24 and Neon may not distribute the same kinds of movies as Disney or Sony, there are more than a few instances where audiences showed they wanted something far stranger than what major studios were offering up. A gigantic company would likely never back something as off-kilter as Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s genre-bending 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but that film went on to make $77 million domestically, and earned a bevy of Oscars, including best picture. Compare that with Daniel Espinosa’s “Morbius” from the same year, a misbegotten superhero actioner that cost more than double than “Everything Everywhere All at Once” but only pulled in $73 million domestically.
At the very least, we know that arthouse cinema is something that doesn’t come from the five major studios: Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, and Warner Bros. That’s not to say they can’t produce great features, but the infrastructure, the number of people that have to sign off on a picture, and the criteria they use to greenlight ideas all but guarantees that the projects they produce are looking for large-scale distribution and broad appeal.
There will certainly be times when a director with clout can get away with something at a major studio (e.g., James Wan’s gonzo horror “Malignant” and Gore Verbinski’s stomach-churning sci-fi mystery “A Cure for Wellness”), or a studio pushes a stranger vehicle into one of its subsidiaries (e.g., Eggers’ “The Northman” and “Nosferatu” coming out of Universal’s Focus Features arm). But even these movies, at the end of the day, are meant for the casual moviegoer.
In the end, the arthouse lies away from the beaten path. There are many roads that lead there, and you’ll probably know it if you see it, even if you don’t (or especially if you don’t) understand it.
