Many critics claim that European cinema's greatest strength lies, not in producing action or science fiction movies like those produced by the large Hollywood studios, but by producing smaller-budget `art house' films. The term `art house' cinema, or simply `art cinema' is commonly used by film critics to designate the varied range of cinemas - usually, although not exclusively - from Europe that offer an alternative to the popular genres (thrillers, actioners, sci-fi, romantic comedies, westerns etc.) produced by the major Hollywood studios. Certainly, in terms of academic discourse, that is to say our ways of talking about French national cinema, most have addressed French film in terms of a certain number of filmmakers or auteurs and movements, in particular la nouvelle vague. A process of canonization and privileging of certain filmmakers (e.g. Renoir) and movements (la nouvelle vague) has been instrumental in the construction of `French cinema'.

`Art house' cinema is closely associated with genres and stylistic modes at odds with the perceived escapism of `Hollywood' productions. Realism (nouvelle vague), ambiguity (Renais: Hiroshima mon amour, 1959) and formal innovation (Godard; Renais: Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) are all distinguishing features of European `art house' cinema. The grounds for distinction then, are aesthetic. However, the easy distinction between art cinema and Hollywood is perhaps a more difficult one to defend nowadays with many apparently mainstream `Hollywood' productions, the so-called classical Hollywood mode of production, exhibiting these kind of characteristics and preoccupations. Moreover, many supposedly art films are often formally conventional and strong narrative, escapism. The so-called `Heritage film' is a good example of this. The association of the art film with realism, ambiguity and formal innovation is limited to a certain historical period in European cinema - the late 1950s until the mid 1970s.

Another distinguishing feature of European `art house' cinema is the greater emphasis on the imagination and vision of the filmmaker who is not an anonymous figure in the background, a mere technician in the pay of the studio but a kind of author or auteur, to use the French term, whose creativity informs the films he or she produces. In the early years of cinema a nmber of dominant filmakers emerged in diffrent parts of the filmmaking world. However, many critics have claimed that it was in Europe rather then the United States, that the director enjoyed the greater degree of directorial control.

The concept of the auteur, as its French name suggests, a French idea which emerged in the 1950s. The film critic Alexandre Astruc started the ball rolling in an article for the journal L'Écran français in 1948 when he wrote of le caméra-stylo. Astruc argued that cinema could become "a means of expression as subtle as that of written language" with the director becoming a kind of author. Astruc's ideas were developed by a later generation of critics, like Andr Bazin, and filmakers, like François Truffaut, associated with the French cinema journal Cahiers du cinéma. In 1954 Truffaut wrote an article called `Une certaine tendance du cinéma français' in which he claimed that the director enjoyed the principal responsibility for making aesthetic choices. Andrew Sarris in the United States championed and developed this under the name the `auteur theory' and claimed that films bore the signature of their creators, through common themes, preoccupations or stylistic features. Implicit in this theory is the idea of the individual auteur developing in proficiency, maturity and originality throughout their career.

`Art house' cinema is, of course, not the sole preserve of Europe and beyond and can be found in American cinema too with directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppela fitting neatly into this category. However, both the notion of `art house' and the auteur have been frequently used by European culture ministers as well as some critics, to help construct a specifically European or specifically French cinema tradition. inseparable from the idea of Europeanness and from value. American culture is perceived as inferior, low grade and corruptive and European cinema, with its links to a vast range of European visual and literary culture. The `Old World' as library/art gallery for European filmmakers to take inspiration from.