A prolific film reviewer and director of eight films in the early 1920s, Louis Delluc is renowned for being France’s first film critic—a justifiable status to the extent that he was the first figure to develop and apply specifically cinematic criteria in his reception of films. Delluc began as a theater critic and playwright before turning to film reviewing in 1917, after exposure to the nascent Hollywood cinema of Griffith, DeMille, and Chaplin. In the seven years up to his premature death, he wrote for publications including Le Film, Paris-Midi, Le Journal du Ciné-Club, and Cinéa, and developed a literary, often ironic writing style privileging a radically subjective approach to the cinematic viewing experience over the establishment of objective artistic norms.