A Filmarian Series
The Movements That Changed Cinema
If the History of Hollywood is the story of the business, this is the story of the art — fourteen movements that tore up the rulebook and rewrote what a film could be, from 1919 Berlin to present-day Seoul.
Fourteen movements · six continents · a century of reinvention
01 · Germany · 1919–1931
German Expressionism
Painted shadows and psychological dread — the nightmare style that fled the Nazis and became the DNA of horror and film noir.
Key figuresWieneMurnauLang
Read this chapter02 · Soviet Union · 1924–1935
Soviet Montage
The revolution moved to the cutting room — the idea that meaning is made not in the shot, but between them.
Key figuresEisensteinPudovkinVertov
Read this chapter03 · France · 1918–1939
French Impressionism and Poetic Realism
Doomed working-class romance in studio-built fog — the fatalistic French cinema between the wars.
Key figuresRenoirCarnéGance
Read this chapter04 · Italy · 1943–1952
Italian Neorealism
Real streets, real faces, real poverty — the postwar movement that reset cinema and seeded every New Wave that followed.
Key figuresRosselliniDe SicaVisconti
Read this chapter05 · Japan · 1950–1960
The Japanese Golden Age
The decade a national cinema reached its summit — and a lion at Venice opened Japan to the world.
Key figuresKurosawaOzuMizoguchi
Read this chapter06 · France · 1958–1968
The French New Wave
Critics who grabbed cameras — jump cuts, the open street, and the auteur theory that changed how we talk about film.
Key figuresGodardTruffautVarda
Read this chapter07 · United Kingdom · 1956–1963
British Kitchen Sink Realism
Angry young men in the industrial north — British cinema discovers the working class.
Key figuresReiszRichardsonAnderson
Read this chapter08 · Czechoslovakia · 1962–1968
The Czechoslovak New Wave
Absurdist, subversive, joyful — a cinema of the Prague Spring, silenced by Soviet tanks.
Key figuresMenzelChytilováForman
Read this chapter09 · West Germany · 1962–1982
New German Cinema
“Papa's cinema is dead” — Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders reckon with the German past.
Key figuresFassbinderHerzogWenders
Read this chapter10 · Brazil · 1960–1974
Cinema Novo
The aesthetics of hunger — Brazil's radical, anti-colonial cinema of the favela and the arid sertão.
Key figuresGlauber Rochados Santos
Read this chapter11 · Hong Kong · 1979–2000
The Hong Kong New Wave
Heroic bloodshed and lovelorn neon — a cinema racing the clock toward the 1997 handover.
Key figuresWong Kar-waiJohn WooTsui Hark
Read this chapter12 · Denmark · 1995–2005
Dogme 95
A vow of chastity — handheld, natural light, no tricks: von Trier and Vinterberg's manifesto and prank.
Key figuresvon TrierVinterberg
Read this chapter13 · Iran · 1969–2011
The Iranian New Wave
Humanist masterpieces made inside censorship — children, mirrors, and the blur of fiction and truth.
Key figuresKiarostamiPanahiFarhadi
Read this chapter14 · South Korea · 1999–present
The Korean New Wave
Genre-bending, tonally fearless, world-conquering — from Oldboy to Parasite's Best Picture.
Key figuresBong Joon-hoPark Chan-wookLee Chang-dong
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