Minimalism Film

As an artistic style, minimalism has a clear interpretation in artistic areas likeengineering and painting. In the art of film, researchers generally regard the works ofRobert Bresson, the French director, as the representive of mininalism even thoughthere is no explicit definition of mininalism in academic circles. This thesis sortedthrough several distinct trends of minimalism in movie history, ranging from puremovies in1920s to avantgarde movies in1970s, and extracted the concept ofminimalism image, which was used then as a basic tool to analysis minimalism movieworks. This thesis used Michael Haneke’s films as its examples and emphasised onstudying them. Researchers have pointed out the tendency of minimalism in recent filmsof Haneke, but there is no papers, from the perspective of minimalism, to study all hisfilms as a constantly changing one on the whole. This thesis creatively divided his filmworks into three periods and investigated the evolution of minimalism elements in hisworks period by period. Synchronically，it compared him with other minimalism-pronedirectors at the same time, and diachronically, with directors Yasujiro Ozu and RobertBresson, representatives of eastern and western minimalism respectively.By studying on the point of Hanake, chapter three of this thesis extended the viewinto the living environment of contemporary minimalism films and discussed theprospect of applying the Haneke’s minimalism skill into Hollywood movies from pointsof digital techniques and commerciality.