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Despite Hollywood’s dominance of the film industry, viewers have long had alternatives to the feature-length, hugely attended, big-budget movies offered by the studio system. These alternatives include foreign films, documentaries, and independent films.

Foreign Films

Films made in other countries constitute less than 2 percent of motion pictures seen in the United States today. Yet foreign films did well in 1920s America, especially in diverse neighborhoods in large cities. These films’ popularity has waxed and waned since the Great Depression, in response to developments such as assimilation of immigrants, postwar prosperity, and the rise of home-market video.

To be sure, the modern success in the United States of movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Taiwan, 2000), Amélie (France, 2001), and The Lives of Others (Germany, 2006) suggest that American audiences are willing to watch subtitled films with non-Hollywood perspectives. But foreign films have continued losing screen space to the expanding independent American film market. Today, the largest foreign-film industry is in India, which aficionados call “Bollywood” (a play on words combining Bombay and Hollywood). Bollywood produces as many as one thousand films every year, most of them romances or adventure musicals showing a distinct style.

There are other avenues for U.S. audiences seeking access to international cinema. The Global Film Initiative, for example, selects and distributes an annual film series to more than thirty-five locations in the United States, including many college campuses. Global Lens 2012 includes films from Albania, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, and Rwanda.

Documentaries

Documentaries, through which directors interpret reality by recording real people and settings, evolved from several earlier types of nonfictional movies: interest films (which contained compiled footage of regional wars, political leaders, industrial workers, and agricultural scenes), newsreels, and travelogues (depictions of daily life in various communities around the world).

Over time, documentaries developed a unique identity. As educational, noncommercial presentations, they usually required the backing of industry, government, or philanthropy to cover production and other costs. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of portable cameras led to a documentary style known as cinema verité (French for “truth film”). Portable cameras enabled documentarians (such as Robert Drew, for Primary, 1960) to go where cameras could not go before and record fragments of everyday life unobtrusively.

Perhaps the major contribution of documentaries has been their willingness to tackle controversial subject matter. For example, American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore often targets corporations or the government in his films, which include Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critique of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies and the Iraq war, and Sicko (2007), an investigation into the flaws of the U.S. health-care system. Former Vice President Al Gore used the film version of his presentation An Inconvenient Truth (2006) to spearhead environmental advocacy; there have also been a number of other successful recent nature documentaries, including March of the Penguins (2005) and Chimpanzee (2012).

Independent Films

The success of some documentary films dovetails with the rise of indies, another alternative to the Hollywood system. As opposed to directors who work within the Hollywood system, independent filmmakers typically operate on a shoestring budget and show their movies in campus auditoriums, small film festivals, and—if they’re lucky—independent theaters. Successful independents like Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma), Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, I’m Not There), and Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) continue to find substantial audiences in theaters and through online services like Netflix, which promote work produced outside the studio system.