In modern Greek κριση/krisemeans both a moment of difficulty, and judgement or discernment. The etymological origins of the English word ‘crisis’ are Greek, and its secondary meaning in Greek, that of judgement, was in use in the English language until the early eighteenth century. The first non-specialised definition of crisis in the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a ‘vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; now applied esp. to times of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense in politics or commerce’. This definition shows the crucial link between the two Greek meanings of the word and between the English word's previous and current usages. A crisis is a period of difficulty or insecurity, a moment of decisive change, a turning point. To ensure that this change or turn is a positive one, one must exercise good judgement and sound decision making. As Eugene Hollahan asserts, crisis is used ‘as signifier for stressful circumstances, as signifier for dialectical turning points, and as signifier evoking, inducing or even necessitating decisions or judgments’ (1992: 4). In other words, crisis challenges our intellectual faculties and compels us to use them.

Throughout its history art cinema has been perceived as an intellectual mode of film making. Avoiding many of the emotional manipulations of popular forms, art films use detachment, analytical style and ambiguity to pose difficult questions to the viewer. Noël Burch defines modernist cinema, of which much of post-war art cinema was a prime example, as a mode of film making that subverts, deconstructs and critically challenges the aesthetic and ideological tenets of classical cinema (1981: 15). Alexandre Astruc saw the development of cinema after 1945, the period in which art cinema became institutionalised and stabilised as a recognisable form, as moving in the direction of philosophy and writing, one in which film language could be used to express abstract thoughts (1968: 18–20; see also Kovács 2007: 37–9). The association of art cinema with an intellectual mode of address presents it as a promising candidate for the facilitation of critical analysis in a time of crisis.