Film movements

The era of early cinema, roughly spanning from 1885 to the early 1910s, marked the birth of motion pictures and the development of fundamental filmmaking techniques. This period saw the introduction o…

Classical Hollywood Silent Cinema (1908-1927) was a period of rapid growth and artistic development in the U.S. film industry, marked by the formation of major studios and the establishment of narrati…

Italian futurist cinema was the oldest movement of European avant-garde cinema. Italian futurism, an artistic and social movement, impacted the Italian film industry from 1916 to 1919. It influenced R…

German Expressionism was an influential avant-garde film movement that emerged in Germany in the early 20th century, primarily between 1919 and 1926, reaching its peak in the 1920s. Rejecting cinemat…

French Impressionism was a silent film movement in France from roughly 1918 to 1930 that prioritized subjective experience and emotional exploration over a traditional narrative. It achieved this thro…

Surrealist film is a cinematic movement that uses dreams and the subconscious to reject conventional reality, featuring illogical juxtapositions, irrational narratives, and shocking or bizarre imagery…

Soviet montage theory, also known as intellectual montage, is a film editing technique that emphasizes the combination of shots to create new meanings and evoke complex emotions. It was developed in t…

The Documentary Film Movement (1929-1950) was a British cinematic movement, pioneered by John Grierson, that used film to address social issues and educate the public. Characterized by a socially cons…

Poetic Realism was a French film movement from the 1930s and early 1940s that combined gritty realism with artistic and lyrical elements. It featured stories about the working class and marginalized c…

Italian neorealism was a post-World War II Italian film movement in the 1940s and 1950s, characterized by its focus on the poor and working class, using real locations, non-professional actors, and do…

Parallel cinema, or New Indian Cinema, was an art film movement in India from the 1950s to the 1990s that served as an alternative to mainstream commercial films. It was characterized by its realistic…

The Polish Film School was an informal collective of Polish filmmakers and screenwriters active roughly between 1956 and 1963. Emerging in the post–World War II context, the movement emphasized person…

The French New Wave is a revolutionary film movement in the 1950s and 1960s France that rejected traditional filmmaking conventions to embrace experimental techniques, the auteur theory (emphasizing t…

The Japanese New Wave was a groundbreaking film movement that emerged in the late 1950s and continued into the 1970s. While it paralleled other international cinematic revolutions such as the French N…

Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité are documentary styles emerging in the late 1950s using lightweight cameras and sync sound, yet they differ in approach. Direct Cinema Direct cinema is a documentary …

Cinema Novo (Brazilian New Wave) was an influential Brazilian film movement from the late 1950s to the early 1970s that transformed the country’s cinema. Its main themes are social inequality, poverty…

The British New Wave was a cinematic movement in the 1950s and 1960s that focused on social realism and the struggles of the working class, often referred to as "kitchen sink realism". Originating fro…

After the Communist Party seized power in 1948, the state imposed strict control over cultural and artistic life. This period greatly limited creative expression, turning cinema into a vehicle for gov…

Post-revolution Cuban cinema (1960s-1970s) was established by the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) in 1959 to create a, new, decolonized national culture, blending revolutio…

The Yugoslav Black Wave (1960s–early 1970s) was a radical film movement that critiqued socialist utopian ideals by focusing on "dark," gritty, and realistic portrayals of Yugoslav society. It was char…

New Hollywood, or American New Wave covering roughly the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, marked a major shift in American filmmaking. This era emphasized director-led projects shaped by countercult…

New German Cinema - Neuer Deutscher Film - (1960s–1980s) was a radical, auteur-driven film movement (known as Neuer Deutscher Film) that emerged in West Germany to reject commercial "Papa’s Kino" (Pap…

The New Spanish Cinema movement broadly refers to the creative flourishing of Spanish film that began in the 1960s with a push for modernization and social critique, and exploded into a full cultural …

The Iranian New Wave (roughly 1960s–2010s) was a transformative, poetic, and often neorealist film movement marked by three distinct phases: the pre-revolutionary rise (1960s–1979), post-revolutionary…

The history of African cinema is inseparable from the continent’s political struggles. From the early days of independence, filmmakers viewed cinema as more than just an art form—it was a political we…

The Australian New Wave (Australian Film Revival, Australian Film Renaissance, or New Australian Cinema) was a defining period in the nation's cinematic history, flourishing from the early 1970s throu…

Originating in New York City’s Lower East Side during the 1970s and 1980s, a loose collective of filmmakers and artists created a bold, boundary-pushing body of work that later became known as No Wave…

The Hong Kong New Wave emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s during a period of rapid economic growth and modernization. Driven by a new generation of filmmakers, many of whom studied abroad and g…

For a decade, from 1966 to 1976, filmmaking in China was nearly wiped out, with cinema limited largely to propaganda operas. The reopening of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 introduced a new generati…

DOGMA 95 – The Manifest DOGMA 95 is a collection of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995. DOGMA 95 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today. DOGM…

The Sixth Generation (The Urban Generation) Chinese Cinema (1990s–2010s) is an underground, independent, and gritty film movement that emerged as a direct response to the rapid modernization, urbaniza…

Through a mix of razor-sharp realism and pitch-black humor, the films of the Romanian New Wave turn everyday dilemmas into gripping moral dramas. Provocatively merging the personal and the political, …

The Greek Weird Wave emerged in the late 2000s as a cinematic response to the turmoil unleashed by the 2008 financial crisis. Rejecting traditional storytelling, its filmmakers embraced surrealism, de…