Art film

An art film is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience. An art film is "intended to be a serious artistic work, often experimental and not designed for mass appeal"; they are "made primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than commercial profit", and they contain "unconventional or highly symbolic content".

Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an art film as possessing "formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films", which can include, among other elements, a sense of social realism; an emphasis on the authorial expressiveness of the director; and a focus on the thoughts, dreams, or motivations of characters, as opposed to the unfolding of a clear, goal-driven story. Film scholar David Bordwell describes art cinema as "a film genre, with its own distinct conventions".

Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (repertory cinemas, or, in the U.S., "arthouse cinemas") and film festivals. The term art film is much more widely used in the United States, the UK and Australia than in Europe, where the term is more associated with "auteur" films and "national cinema" (e.g., German national cinema). Because they are aimed at small niche market audiences, they can rarely get the financial backing that will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely released mainstream blockbuster films. Art film directors make up for these constraints by creating a different type of film, which typically uses lesser-known film actors (or even amateur actors) and modest sets to make films that focus much more on developing ideas or exploring new narrative techniques or film-making conventions.

Artò

Artò is a frazione (and parish) of the municipality of Madonna del Sasso, in Piedmont, northern Italy.

Overview

It is a village located some km west from the Lake Orta.

History

Since 1928 Artò was a separate comune (municipality).

References

External links

Media related to Artò at Wikimedia Commons

Artà

Coordinates: 39°42′N 3°21′E / 39.700°N 3.350°E / 39.700; 3.350

Artà is one of the 53 independent municipalities on the Spanish Balearic island of Majorca. The small town of the same name is the administrative seat of this municipality in the region (Comarca) of Llevant.

Population

In 2008 the municipality of Artà had a population of 7,113 recorded residents within an area of 139.63 square kilometres (53.91 sq mi). This equates to 50.9 inhabitants per km². In 2006 the percentage of foreigners was 13.2% (890), of which Germans made up 3.9% (262). In 1991 there were still 136 illiterates in the municipality. 1,292 inhabitants had no education, 1,675 only a primary school certificate and 1,210 had secondary school leaving certificates. The official languages are Catalan and Spanish (Castilian). The Catalan dialect spoken on the island is known as Mallorquí.

Geography

Location

Artà lies in the northeast of the island of Majorca, around 60 km from the island's capital of Palma. The Massís d’Artà, the highest and most compact massif in the eastern mountain chain of the Serres de Llevant, occupies more than half the area of the municipality. The municipality is located on the western part of peninsula of Artà and is bordered in the west by the Bay of Alcúdia (Badia d’Alcúdia), and in the north by the Mediterranean sea where its coast lies opposite the neighbouring island of Minorca. The coast of Artà stretches for 25 kilometres and, so far, has escaped being developed. Particularly noteworthy are the beach and sand dune formations of sa Canova d’Artà, the flat coastal strip near the settlement of Colònia de Sant Pere, the high rocky coves of the Cap de Ferrutx and a large number of smaller bays that extend from s’Arenalet des Verger to Cala Torta.

ART image file format

ART is a proprietary image file format used mostly by the America Online (AOL) service and client software.

Technical details

The ART format (file extension ".art") holds a single still image that has been highly compressed. The format was designed to facilitate the quick downloading of images, among other things. Originally, the compression was developed by the Johnson-Grace Company, which was then acquired by AOL. When an image is converted to the ART format, the image is analyzed and the software decides what compression technique would be best. The ART format has similarities to the progressive JPEG format, and certain attributes of the ART format can lead to image quality being sacrificed for the sake of image compression (for instance, the image's color palette can be limited.)

Usage by AOL

The AOL service used the ART image format for most of the image presentation of the online service. In addition, the AOL client's web browser also automatically served such images in the ART format to achieve faster downloads on the slower dialup connections that were prevalent in those days. This conversion was done in the AOL proxy servers and could be optionally disabled by the user. This image conversion process effectively reduced the download time for image files. This technology was once branded as Turboweb and is now known as AOL TopSpeed.