Film styles

Art film is a film genre with a loose narrative, often experimental, presented as a serious artistic work. Some films that can fall into this catagory are foreign-language films, indepdendent and non-mainstream films, as well as documentaries and short films. The producers of art films seek a niche audience rather than mass appeal and usually present their work at specialty theatres and film festivals in large urban areas. Art film provides similar kinds of cinematic illusion that one finds in classical Hollywood cinema as well as allusions to previous periods in cinematic history. However, by loosening the ties between its style and narrative concerns, it allows for increased subjective realism and authorial expressivity. Art film"

Cinéma vérité is a style of filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques that originated in documentary filmmaking, with the storytelling elements typical of a scripted or semi-scripted film. The name is a French phrase meaning, literally "true film". The term comes from the literal translation of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda, a documentary series of the 1920s. While Vertov's announced intention in coining the word was to use film as a means of getting at "hidden" truth, largely through juxtapositions of scenes, the French term refers more to a technique influenced by Vertov than to his specific intentions. Cinéma vérité"

Expressionism in filmmaking developed in Germany (especially Berlin) during the 1920s. During the period of recovery following World War I, the German film industry was booming, but because of the hard economic times filmmakers found it difficult to create movies that could compare with the lush, extravagant features coming from Hollywood. The filmmakers of the German UFA studio developed a method of compensating for the lack of high budgets, by using symbolism and mise-en-scène to insert mood and deeper meaning into a movie.