Redefining film genre in the era of multi-million dollar blockbusters
When it comes to today’s cinema, how do box office figures affect the genre label ‘art-house’ and when are films allowed to run with the description, asks Pete Castaldi.
I keep reading that the George Clooney film The Descendants is an art-house picture. Fantastic. A coup for art cinema; released in Australia mid-January on 189 screens with an opening week gross of almost $2.5 million. A spectacular result, for so-called art-house. With The Ides of March charting at number 20, eight weeks in, with a box-office gross of $4.4 million, Mr Clooney must now be affirmed as the poster boy of art-house.
The Descendants seems to have been classified as art-house by sheer force of its co-writer and director Alexander Payne. His pedigree slots him out of the mainstream, in the English language market at least. As writer-director of Citizen Ruth, Election, and Sideways he certainly was in the darling club of independent vision and story; quirky, off-centre and unexpected, and so very art-house in his sensibilities.
But what happened to Payne and the art-house genre when Sideways went from opening in the US on four screens to closing almost seven months later, after hitting 1,800 screens, with a gross of almost $US72million? It was one of those spectacular breakout films that no-one saw coming – a bit like last year’s Midnight in Paris.
Good points made here. Arthouse has become a name on a silk lined box, one where little films and big films end up, when they fail to meet the criteria established by any of the names on all the other boxes.
It would be my guess that the box office in this case has processed so many dollars on account of the Clooney factor, a phenomenon which has threatened quality in the industry for many years, as a matter of fact, since not many years after the advent of, so called, movies.
There has been a number of attempts to get away from the “Star System” over the years, but the greedy “bean counters” and the “art baggers” have always clawed it back into frame. Better to run an almost sure thing than to attempt to create something that might get up on its own merits. Art can and does make money, but Money makes more money more easily. Why create Haut Cuisine on fine china when you can sell Starfish and chips in paper bags marked Arthouse?
My local arthouse cinema shows World Cinema and anything that isn’t shown at the Multi-plex.
My favourite Arthouse Cinema anywhere is in the basement of Auckland Library. Ten seats. Eclectic film choices and very comfy seats.