Since the rise of the studio system, the Hollywood film industry has focused on feature-length movies that command popular attention and earn the most money. However, the movie industry also has a long tradition of films made outside of the Hollywood studio system. In the following sections, we look at three alternatives to Hollywood: international films, documentaries, and independent films.

Global Cinema

For generations, Hollywood has dominated the global movie scene. In many countries, American films capture up to 90 percent of the market. In striking contrast, foreign films constitute only a tiny fraction—less than 2 percent—of motion pictures seen in the United States today. Despite Hollywood’s domination of global film distribution, other countries have a rich history in producing both successful and provocative short-subject and feature films. For example, cinematic movements of the twentieth century such as German expressionism (capturing psychological moods), Soviet social realism (presenting a positive view of Soviet life), Italian neorealism (focusing on the everyday lives of Italians), European new-wave cinema (experimenting with the language of film), and post–World War II Japanese, Hong Kong, Korean, Australian, Canadian, and British cinema have all been extremely influential, demonstrating alternatives to the Hollywood approach.

Early on, Americans showed interest in British and French short films and in experimental films such as Germany’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Foreign-language movies did reasonably well throughout the 1920s, especially in ethnic neighborhood theaters in large American cities. For a time, Hollywood studios even dubbed some popular American movies into Spanish, Italian, French, and German for these theaters. But the Depression brought cutbacks, and by the 1930s the daughters and sons of turn-of-the-century immigrants—many of whom were trying to assimilate into mainstream American culture—preferred their Hollywood movies in English.⁹

Postwar prosperity, rising globalism, and the gradual decline of the studios’ hold over theater exhibition in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated the rise of art-house theaters and saw a rebirth of interest in foreign-language films by such prominent directors as Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries, 1957), Italy’s Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 1960), France’s François Truffaut ( Jules and Jim, 1961), Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, 1954), and India’s Satyajit Ray (Apu Trilogy, 1955–59). Catering to academic audiences, art houses made a statement against Hollywood commercialism as they sought to show alternative movies.

By the late 1970s, though, the home-video market had emerged, and audiences began staying home to watch both foreign and domestic films. New multiplex theater owners rejected the smaller profit margins of most foreign titles, which lacked the promotional hype of U.S. films. As a result, between 1966 and 1990 the number of foreign films released annually in the United States dropped by two-thirds, from nearly three hundred to about one hundred titles per year.

With the growth of superstore video chains like Blockbuster in the 1990s and online video services like Netflix in the 2000s, viewers gained access to a larger selection of foreign-language titles. The successes of Life Is Beautiful (Italy, 1997), Amélie (France, 2001), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009) illustrate that U.S. audiences are willing to watch subtitled films with non-Hollywood perspectives. However, foreign films are losing ground as they compete with the expanding independent American film market for screen space.

Today, the largest film industry is in India, out of “Bollywood” (a play on words combining city names Bombay—now Mumbai—and Hollywood), where a thousand films a year are produced—mostly romance or adventure musicals in a distinct style.¹⁰ In comparison, Hollywood moviemakers release five hundred to six hundred films a year. (For a broader perspective, see “Global Village: Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema”.)

The Documentary Tradition

Both TV news and nonfiction films trace their roots to the movie industry’s interest films and newsreels of the late 1890s. In Britain, interest films compiled footage of regional wars, political leaders, industrial workers, and agricultural scenes and were screened with fiction shorts. Pioneered in France and England, newsreels consisted of weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world. International news services began supplying theaters and movie studios with newsreels, and by 1911 they had become a regular part of the moviegoing menu.

Early filmmakers also produced travelogues, which recorded daily life in various communities around the world. Travel films reached a new status in Robert Flaherty’s classic Nanook of the North (1922), which tracked an Inuit family in the harsh Hudson Bay region of Canada. Flaherty edited his fifty-five-minute film to both tell and interpret the story of his subject. Flaherty’s second film, Moana (1925), a study of the lush South Pacific islands, inspired the term documentary in a 1926 film review by John Grierson, a Scottish film producer. Grierson defined Flaherty’s work and the documentary form as “the creative treatment of actuality,” or a genre that interprets reality by recording real people and settings.

Over time, the documentary developed an identity apart from its commercial presentation. As an educational, noncommercial form, the documentary usually required the backing of industry, government, or philanthropy to cover costs. In support of a clear alternative to Hollywood cinema, some nations began creating special units, such as Canada’s National Film Board, to sponsor documentaries. In the United States, art and film received considerable support from the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of portable cameras had led to cinema verité (a French term for “truth film”). This documentary style allowed filmmakers to go where cameras could not go before and record fragments of everyday life more unobtrusively. Directly opposed to packaged, high-gloss Hollywood features, verité aimed to track reality, employing a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work. Among the key innovators in cinema verité were Drew and Associates, led by Robert Drew, a former Life magazine photographer. Through his connection to Time Inc. (which owned Life) and its chain of TV stations, Drew shot the groundbreaking documentary Primary, which followed the 1960 Democratic presidential primary race between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.

Perhaps the major contribution of documentaries has been their willingness to tackle controversial or unpopular subject matter. For example, American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore often addresses complex topics that target corporations or the government. His films include Roger and Me (1989), a comic and controversial look at the relationship between the city of Flint, Michigan, and General Motors; the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine (2002), which explored gun violence; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critique of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies; Sicko (2007), an investigation of the U.S. health-care system; and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), about corporate culture in the United States. Moore’s recent films were part of a resurgence in high-profile documentary filmmaking in the United States, which included The Fog of War (2003), Super Size Me (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The Cove (2009), Waiting for Superman (2010), and Bully (2012).

The Rise of Independent Films

The success of documentary films like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 dovetails with the rise of indies, or independently produced films. As opposed to directors working in the Hollywood system, independent filmmakers typically operate on a shoestring budget and show their movies in thousands of campus auditoriums and at hundreds of small film festivals. The decreasing costs of portable technology, including smaller digital cameras and computer editing, have kept many documentary and independent filmmakers in business. They make movies inexpensively, relying on real-life situations, stage actors and nonactors, crews made up of friends and students, and local nonstudio settings. Successful independents like Kevin Smith (Clerks, 1994; Cop Out, 2010), Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain, 2006; The Wrestler, 2008; Black Swan, 2010), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003; The Bling Ring, 2013) continue to find substantial audiences in college and art-house theaters and through online DVD services like Netflix, which promote work produced outside the studio system.

The rise of independent film festivals in the 1990s—especially the Sundance Film Festival held every January in Park City, Utah—helped Hollywood rediscover low-cost independent films as an alternative to traditional movies with Titanic-size budgets. Films such as Little Miss Sunshine (2006), 500 Days of Summer (2009), Our Idiot Brother (2011), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) were able to generate industry buzz and garner major studio distribution deals through Sundance screenings, becoming star vehicles for several directors and actors. As with the recording industry, the major studios see these festivals—which also include New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and international film festivals in Toronto and Cannes—as important venues for discovering new talent. Some major studios even purchased successful independent film companies (Disney’s purchase of Miramax) or have developed in-house indie divisions (Sony’s Sony Pictures Classics) to specifically handle the development and distribution of indies.

But by 2010, the independent film business as a feeder system for major studios was declining due to the poor economy and studios’ waning interest in smaller, specialty films. Disney sold Miramax for $660 million to an investor group comprised of Hollywood outsiders. Viacom folded its independent unit, Paramount Vantage, into its main studio; and Time Warner closed its Warner Independent and Picturehouse in-house indie divisions. Meanwhile, producers of low-budget independent films increasingly looked to alternative digital distribution models, such as Internet downloads, direct DVD sales, and on-demand screenings via cable and services like Netflix.