Film Movements

A loose association of photographer-filmmakers working around Brighton and Hove in cinema's first fifteen years. They invented much of the grammar that took film from the single-shot “view” to multi-shot narrative: the close-up, point-of-view cutting, the chase edit. They had no manifesto; their status as a movement is a retrospective reading by film historians.

Key films: Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) · The Big Swallow (1901) · Rescued by Rover (1905)

Marinetti’s Futurism carried into film, declared in the 1916 Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography. Speed, machines, simultaneity and anti-naturalist editing: the first programme to treat cinema not as a storytelling device but as a machine for pure motion and sensation. Almost every film is lost; only half of Thaïs survives.

Key films: Vita futurista (1916) · Thaïs (1917) · Il perfido incanto (1918)

A campaign to stop Japanese cinema being a recording device for kabuki and shinpa theatre. Critics around Kinema Record and Kinema Junpō attacked the onnagata (men in female roles), the benshi (the live narrator beside the screen) and long takes without intertitles, demanding screenplays, close-ups and analytical editing. When the critics themselves moved behind the camera, the demand became film.

Key films: The Glow of Life / Sei no kagayaki (1918) · Amateur Club / Amachua kurabu (1920) · Souls on the Road / Rojō no reikon (1921)

Also called the “first avant-garde”: a 1920s French search for ways to render subjective experience in images. Soft focus, superimposition, rapid cutting and the handheld camera put a character’s mind, drunkenness or memory directly on screen. Because they were never bound to a single manifesto, scholars still argue over whether this counts as a movement at all.

Key films: Cœur fidèle (1923) · La Roue (1923) · Napoléon (1927) | Drew on: Italian futurism in cinema.

Post-war Germany’s crisis displaced onto sets and light, abandoning realism altogether. Warped architecture, shadows painted onto the floor, heightened performance: the inner world replaces the outer one. When its directors emigrated to Hollywood in the 1930s the idiom passed into film noir and the horror film.

Key films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) · Nosferatu (1922) · Metropolis (1927) | Drew on: Italian futurism in cinema.

Named after the Kammerspiele, the intimate theatre Max Reinhardt opened in 1906. It dropped Expressionism’s warped sets for silent dramas with few characters in enclosed spaces, focused on lower-middle-class psychology: intertitles are almost absent and the camera and the face carry the story. Few were made, and nearly all became classics.

Key films: Shattered / Scherben (1921) · Sylvester (1924) · The Last Laugh / Der letzte Mann (1924) | Drew on: German expressionist cinema.

Film that abandons storytelling entirely and takes motion, rhythm and shifting composition as its subject. It was formalised in the 1920s as “absolute film” in Germany and “cinéma pur” in France; one set out from abstract animation, the other from the rhythmic editing of objects. It continues today as the main line of experimental cinema.

Key films: Rhythmus 21 (1921) · Ballet Mécanique (1924) · Anémic Cinéma (1926) | Drew on: Italian futurism in cinema.

The collective founded by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman, who called themselves “cinema-eyes”. In manifestos published in avant-garde journals such as LEF they rejected fiction, actors and the studio in favour of real life caught by a candid camera. The strand that laid the theoretical ground for documentary.

Key films: Kino-Pravda (1922–1925) · Kino-Eye / Kino-Glaz (1924) · Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The screen counterpart of Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto: dream logic, Freudian symbolism, editing cut loose from causality. It grew up entangled with Dadaist cinéma pur, out to destroy the idea that art represents reality. It dispersed in the 1930s but never really ended; the line runs all the way to Lynch.

Key films: Entr’acte (1924) · Un Chien Andalou (1929) · L’Âge d’Or (1930) | Drew on: Non-narrative film, Italian futurism in cinema.

The state-backed documentary school John Grierson built inside the Empire Marketing Board and the GPO Film Unit. It put the word “documentary” into its modern usage and married the ordinary worker and the public service to a poetic form. It exhausted itself during the war years, turning into a propaganda apparatus.

Key films: Drifters (1929) · Song of Ceylon (1934) · Night Mail (1936) | Drew on: Kinoks.

Less a movement than a shared tone in 1930s France: socially realist material told through a lyrical, fatalistic atmosphere built in the studio. The protagonists are working class, the story usually ends in defeat, and fog, wet pavement and night light are almost characters. War and occupation cut it short; its legacy passed to Italian neorealism and to film noir.

Key films: L’Atalante (1934) · Pépé le Moko (1937) · Le Jour se lève (1939) | Drew on: French impressionist cinema, German expressionist cinema.

A country whose studios lay in ruins going out into the street to shoot, amid the wreckage of fascism and war. Real locations, available light, non-professional actors and everyday poverty: plot loosens, observation takes over. Economic recovery and political pressure dissolved it by the mid-1950s, but it became the common source almost every new wave in the world drew on.

Key films: Rome, Open City (1945) · Bicycle Thieves (1948) · Umberto D. (1952) | Drew on: Poetic realism.

Not a separate movement but a reading of neorealism through its women. In a period when suffrage had just been won and the role fascism assigned to women had collapsed, these films showed women both submitting to those roles and — more often — refusing them. Anna Magnani’s working-class woman became the emblem of that gaze.

Key films: Rome, Open City (1945) · Bitter Rice / Riso amaro (1949) · Bellissima (1951) | Drew on: Italian neorealism.

A realist strand born in Bengal as an alternative to the song-and-dance formula of mainstream Indian cinema. Social content, naturalistic performance, symbolism, and the refusal of interpolated musical numbers. It began before both the French and Japanese new waves and later spread to India’s other language industries.

Key films: Pather Panchali (1955) · Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) · Bhuvan Shome (1969) | Drew on: Italian neorealism.

A documentary programme that opened with three shorts at the National Film Theatre on 5 February 1956 and closed in March 1959. “Free” meant free of propaganda and of box-office calculation: a poetic, partisan look at the ordinary Briton’s leisure, amusement and work. The direct forerunner of British “kitchen sink” realism.

Key films: O Dreamland (1953) · Momma Don’t Allow (1956) · Every Day Except Christmas (1957) | Drew on: Documentary Film Movement, Italian neorealism.

A generation that used the post-Stalin thaw to question, from the inside, the heroic narrative socialist realism demanded. The subject is war, resistance and generational trauma; the outcome is not victory but wasted lives. It came out of the Łódź Film School and faded in the early 1960s as the political climate hardened.

Key films: Kanal (1957) · Ashes and Diamonds (1958) · Eroica (1958) | Drew on: Italian neorealism.

A generation that began inside the studio system — young assistant directors handed films — and quickly turned against it. Sexuality, crime, discrimination against Koreans, the American occupation, the student movement: everything Japanese cinema would not discuss. It became fully independent when Ōshima left Shōchiku to found his own company.

Key films: Cruel Story of Youth (1960) · The Insect Woman (1963) · Woman in the Dunes (1964) | Drew on: Italian neorealism, French New Wave.

The Cahiers du cinéma critics taking the war they had waged on the “tradition of quality” behind the camera. Light equipment, real locations, jump cuts, direct sound and above all the auteur theory: the film belongs to the director, not the studio. Its core period lasted only a few years, but the echo is still heard in every country’s “new wave”.

Key films: The 400 Blows (1959) · Hiroshima mon amour (1959) · Breathless (1960) | Drew on: Italian neorealism, Poetic realism.

The Brazilian movement summed up by Glauber Rocha’s “a camera in hand and an idea in the head”. The hunger of the sertão, coastal inequality and the colonial inheritance; the “Aesthetics of Hunger” manifesto turned poverty itself into an aesthetic principle rather than hiding it. The 1964 coup and post-1968 censorship pushed it first into allegory, then apart.

Key films: Barren Lives / Vidas secas (1963) · Black God, White Devil (1964) · Antonio das Mortes (1969) | Drew on: Italian neorealism, French New Wave.

A FAMU-trained generation probing bureaucracy and conformism with absurdist humour — the “Czechoslovak film miracle”. Its formal range runs from documentary realism to outright surrealism. The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and the “normalisation” that followed shut it down, and many of the films were locked in the vault.

Key films: Daisies / Sedmikrásky (1966) · Closely Watched Trains (1966) · A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966) | Drew on: French New Wave, Italian neorealism.

Auteur cinema built on state funding and television partnership, launched by the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto and its declaration that “Papa’s cinema is dead”. Its subjects: the unsettled legacy of fascism, migration, the years of terrorism, German identity. The period closed in 1982 with Fassbinder’s death and the narrowing of subsidies.

Key films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) · The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) · The Tin Drum (1979) | Drew on: French New Wave, Italian neorealism.

Films that put the contradictions of self-managed socialism on screen and were branded “black” in the official press for it. Outsiders, sexuality, the legacy of war and the hollowness of ideology; formally, collage, documentary inserts and black comedy. After 1971 the directors were banned and some films sat “in the bunker” for decades.

Key films: The Rats Woke Up (1967) · Early Works (1969) · W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) | Drew on: Czechoslovak New Wave, French New Wave.

The group founded by Solanas, Getino and Vallejo, which treated a film not as a work to be screened but as an act to be carried out. Films were shown in union halls and clandestine meetings, with discussion breaks built into the running time. This is the nucleus that wrote and named Third Cinema.

Key films: The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) · Perón: La revolución justicialista (1971) · El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (1971) | Drew on: Cinema Novo, Italian neorealism.

Directors taking authority in the vacuum opened by the studio system’s collapse, television’s rise and the fall of the production code. Ambiguous endings learned from European art cinema, anti-heroes, social unrest. The blockbuster logic established in 1977 and a handful of spectacular flops ended the period.

Key films: Bonnie and Clyde (1967) · Easy Rider (1969) · Taxi Driver (1976) | Drew on: French New Wave, Italian neorealism.

Cheap genre films shot for fast returns in the São Paulo producers’ district known as the “Mouth of Garbage”. Pornochanchada above all, plus erotic comedy, crime, action and kung fu: the opposite pole to Cinema Novo’s intellectual ambition, though a product of the same years. When the military regime and its censorship ended in 1985 it shifted into explicit pornography.

Key films: A Margem (1967) · The Red Light Bandit (1968) · Awakening of the Beast (1969) | Drew on: Cinema Novo.

An anti-colonial programme rejecting Hollywood (First Cinema) and European auteur cinema (Second Cinema) in the same breath. It treats the viewer as a participant in action rather than a consumer, and takes up documentary, essay and collage. Written in Latin America but conceived from the start as tricontinental, it carried into African and Asian cinemas.

Key films: The Battle of Algiers (1966) · Blood of the Condor / Yawar Mallku (1969) · Xala (1975) | Drew on: Grupo Cine Liberación, Cinema Novo.

Black cinema made by African and African-American directors trained at the UCLA Film School, set against Hollywood and blaxploitation alike. Drawing on Third Cinema and Italian neorealism, the films narrate community life from the inside. Because it was school-based it spanned three decades; most of the work never reached commercial distribution.

Key films: Killer of Sheep (1978) · Bush Mama (1979) · Daughters of the Dust (1991) | Drew on: Third Cinema, Cinema Novo, Italian neorealism.

A national cinema conjured almost from nothing by the creation of state funding bodies, breaking into the world market. Respectable period films on one side, the hard genre cinema known as Ozploitation on the other. It dispersed in the mid-1980s as its directors moved to Hollywood.

Key films: Wake in Fright (1971) · Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) · Mad Max (1979) | Drew on: New Hollywood, Free Cinema.

The Hungarian movement, also called documentarism, that came out of the Béla Balázs Studio. Films shot without scripts, with handheld cameras and amateurs playing versions of themselves; the aim was to erase the line between fiction and documentary. Béla Tarr made his first film here at twenty-two.

Key films: The Prize Trip / Jutalomutazás (1975) · Cséplő Gyuri (1978) · Family Nest / Családi tűzfészek (1979) | Drew on: Italian neorealism, Czechoslovak New Wave.

A short-lived Polish movement that told the rot of the regime through the everyday moral conflicts of provincial towns. The protagonist is typically a technician, a manager or a journalist caught between conscience and career. Martial law in 1981 cut it off overnight.

Key films: Man of Marble (1977) · Camouflage / Barwy ochronne (1977) · Camera Buff / Amator (1979) | Drew on: Polish Film School, Budapest school.

Guerrilla filmmaking born on New York’s Lower East Side, entangled with the music scene of the same name. Super 8 and 16 mm, no rehearsal, no budget; dark, dirty and fast. It produced a generation from Jim Jarmusch to Kathryn Bigelow — and the Cinema of Transgression.

Key films: The Blank Generation (1976) · Rome ’78 (1978) · Permanent Vacation (1980) | Drew on: Non-narrative film, Surrealist cinema.

Soviet underground film made entirely outside the state studios and circulated hand to hand on samizdat logic. Evgenii Iufit and the “necrorealists” in Leningrad, the Aleinikov brothers’ circle in Moscow. It surfaced with perestroika and reached the height of its fame as the USSR came apart.

Key films: Sawyer (1984) · Tractors (1987) · Boar Suicide (1988) | Drew on: Non-narrative film, No wave cinema.

Directors trained in television, most of them educated abroad, renewing genre cinema in an auteur idiom. Real locations, social subject matter and modern editing entered wuxia, crime and ghost films. The identity anxiety of the years before the 1997 handover became the movement’s central theme in its second generation (Wong Kar-wai, Fruit Chan).

Key films: The Butterfly Murders (1979) · Boat People (1982) · Chungking Express (1994) | Drew on: French New Wave, Japanese New Wave.

A French strand that carried advertising and music-video aesthetics into film, leaning on surface rather than substance. The métro, night, neon, solitary young lovers; it is always discussed alongside the charge of superficiality. The period closed as Besson moved up to Hollywood scale.

Key films: Diva (1981) · Betty Blue (1986) · The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) | Drew on: French New Wave, New Hollywood.

The New York underground movement Nick Zedd named in 1985, emerging from within No Wave. Films shot on cheap 8 mm cameras that treat shock value and black humour as explicit aesthetic principles; Zedd’s manifesto argues for putting excess in the place of moral values. It also reads as an answer to the AIDS crisis and Reagan-era moralism.

Key films: You Killed Me First (1985) · Where Evil Dwells (1985) · Stigmata (1991) | Drew on: No wave cinema, Surrealist cinema.

The independent wave B. Ruby Rich named in Sight & Sound in 1992. It refused the demand for “positive representation” and built queer characters who are criminal, angry, ambiguous and provocative. A direct product of the AIDS crisis and ACT UP activism.

Key films: Poison (1991) · Swoon (1992) · The Living End (1992) | Drew on: Cinema of Transgression, New German Cinema.

Mexican cinema’s first real revival since the Golden Age, set off by the restructuring of the state fund IMCINE and a market reshaped after NAFTA. Themes of identity, tradition and social violence met high production values. It carried its three major directors — Cuarón, Iñárritu, del Toro — to Hollywood within a few years.

Key films: Like Water for Chocolate (1992) · Amores Perros (2000) · Y Tu Mamá También (2001) | Drew on: New Hollywood, Third Cinema.

The ten-point “Vow of Chastity” written by von Trier and Vinterberg: real locations, handheld camera, available light; no effects, no genre, no score, and no director’s credit. The point was to make hiding behind technology or genre impossible. The last great movement founded by manifesto and certified on paper — and even its founders broke the rules.

Key films: The Celebration / Festen (1998) · The Idiots / Idioterne (1998) · Mifune (1999) | Drew on: French New Wave, Italian neorealism, Free Cinema.

A label James Quandt coined pejoratively in 2004 that stuck. Films that force the body, sexuality and violence on the viewer without distance, deliberately erasing the line between arthouse and horror. It began in France but spread across Europe under the name “new extremity”.

Key films: The Piano Teacher (2001) · Irréversible (2002) · Raw / Grave (2016) | Drew on: Cinema of Transgression, Dogme 95, Japanese New Wave.

Less a movement than a tendency — and a marketing label — that surfaced in several countries at once from the late 1990s. The exploitation and splatter inheritance, the Japanese ero guro and pink film traditions and the New French Extremity ended up on the same shelf. Shut out of mainstream distribution, it survives on festival screenings and physical-media collecting.

Key films: Audition (1999) · Oldboy (2003) · Martyrs (2008) | Drew on: New French Extremity, Cinema of Transgression.

Germany’s first collectively named generation to draw international attention since New German Cinema — and it was French critics who named it. Long takes, sparse dialogue, unresolved narratives and the cold spaces of post-reunification Germany. There is no shared manifesto; what is shared is the dffb background and the circle around Revolver magazine.

Key films: Marseille (2004) · Yella (2007) · Barbara (2012) | Drew on: New German Cinema, French New Wave.

Stuckism carried into cinema by the fifteen-point film manifesto Jesse Richards wrote in 2008. It argues for intuition, handmade imperfection and a “new spirituality”, taking wabi-sabi and mono no aware as working methods. It sets itself openly against postmodern irony — and equally against Dogme 95 and the ease of digital video.

Key films: Shooting at the Moon (1998–2003) · The Turin Horse (2011) · Sleep Has Her House (2017) | Drew on: Non-narrative film, Dogme 95.

A micro-budget American independent wave made possible in the mid-2000s by cheap digital cameras. Conversation instead of plot, friends instead of professional actors, relationship hesitation instead of crisis. The name came from a sound engineer’s joke, and most of the directors reject it.

Key films: Funny Ha Ha (2002) · Mutual Appreciation (2005) · Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) | Drew on: Dogme 95, French New Wave.

A generation telling post-Ceaușescu Romania through a cold minimalism with very dry humour. Long takes, real time, natural light and ordinary people wrestling with bureaucracy. It began when two shorts won at Berlin and Cannes in 2004 and became a fixture at Cannes.

Key films: The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) · 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) · Police, Adjective (2009) | Drew on: Italian neorealism, Czechoslovak New Wave, Dogme 95.

Nollywood’s turn from straight-to-video production back to the theatrical film. Higher budgets, more complex narrative and better craft; the multiplexes that opened from 2004 onward were the infrastructure for that shift. In this period Nigerian cinema began to be counted among the largest film industries in the world.

Key films: Irapada (2006) · The Figurine (2009) · October 1 (2014)

From 2011 onward, a group of young directors in Kerala breaking the mainstream hero mould on small budgets. Flawed, ordinary characters, women and minority subjects moved to the centre, and an urban idiom. The strand that made Malayalam cinema nationally visible after the pandemic.

Key films: Traffic (2011) · City of God (2011) · 22 Female Kottayam (2012) | Drew on: Parallel cinema.

A large-scale commercial model that refuses to settle for one language market, releasing simultaneously in Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada versions. Established by Rajamouli’s Baahubali duology, it is read as regional cinema moving to a “national” scale. Less a movement than a distribution and scale strategy.

Key films: Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) · Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017) · RRR (2022)