Anyway, I keep seeing directors like Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky being praised and held in high regard by quite a few MoFos, and I've come to the realization that most of my favourite movies are pretty conventional, even the black-and-white foreign films I love. I don't feel bad about that. I just realize that there's a whole spectrum of cinema I've yet to discover. I did watch Persona recently, and though I did like it, I must say that it wasn't an easy watch. Not that a film should always be easy to watch, just that I'm not used to watching films like Persona.
This is the best paragraph ever. Well, not really, but it hits on all the right things, because "we" don't care if people's favorite films are conventional, what with exposure and levels etc, but the important thing is to acknowledge the rest of the cinematic world. No one should feel bad for the things they like (generalization, I'm sure many people should), but it's good for films like Persona working as a means of jumping in headfirst, which tends to work in these situations.
If you like them, why do you like them? Do you prefer artistic films over more conventional cinema? What made you get into art house films? What art films would you recommend for someone like me?
I think one could often prefer the peculiarities of art films that other films don't bother with, like being remotely challenging, experimenting with less dialogue, more sound, how they use music, etc. Being as invested in art as I am, I personally prefer when film is emotional and speaking on several levels between all its elements, much like certain music, and this is another thing conventional films can't touch. There's two sides to this however which I'll hit on the next bit.
It's possible that Three Colors: Blue REALLY got me into art films. I couldn't tell you what was the first one I saw, let alone the first foreign film, but I remember Blue, and I remember how I have never seen, not even since then, a film that incorporates music like that one did, it was practically another character. Plus the visuals were these things spoken without words that was a bizarre new thing to me at the time. It just got worse when I started learning French. Also, there's a certain humor in many of them (The Ruling Class for instance), as well as undercurrents of several polarities (Certified Copy especially, and Lady Vengeance to me is all at once hilarious, depressing, pensive, and socially aware), and it's probably these mixes...you know that scene in Ratatouille when he combines food and there's swirls of colours swaying in multiple patterns? That's how I feel. EDIT: to answer the above question, I love all of Park Chan Wook, Teshigahara, Cocteau, Kieslowski, Bergman (so far), and Kobayashi. Tomorrow this answer would be different.
I would recommend you more black-and-white stuff to tie in with that which is already familiar to you. You dabbled in Kurosawa, well try Mizoguchi and Teshigahara (this man makes me want to give up on making anything). In fact, depending on how well that goes, you could keep journeying through Japan's stuff, or Asian Pacific in general, but a couple specific ones I think you might like are Black Narcissus and Orpheus.
If you don't like them, why don't you like them? Have you ever watched an art film? Do you you find them hard to watch? If you haven't seen any, would you be open to watching an art house film?
All that said, there's an innumerable amount of these films that are bollocks, and this is generally where art film stereotypes come in. You are inevitably going to find a few of them. However as you said yourself sometimes films can be hard to watch but can also be rewarding. The problem is you don't quite know if it's rewarding until at least another viewing. Kitano's Dolls was extremely hard for me to sit through, as I switched between "this is boring" and "oh my god this is beautifully tragic" at least ten times during.
And which Tarkovsky film would you recommend to watch first?
I pulled a "Sinny" and started with Stalker. I loved it but my god I couldn't recommend starting with that because you're just not prepared for it. I might say Solaris just because it's familiar.
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