Film Subject Overview
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
Search Results 1 - 25 of 155
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Ivory, James (1928–)
James Frances Ivory is an American film director and co-owner of Merchant Ivory Productions. He and his partner, Ismail Merchant, a film producer, formed Merchant…
Delluc, Louis (1890–1924)
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…
Tati, Jacques (1907–1982)
Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff) was a French director and actor. Despite a very small output—only six feature films and three shorts—he is considered one…
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania is an experimental 82-minute color film directed by Jonas Mekas. It documents the director’s and his brother Adolfas’ return…
Politics and Cinema
The relationship between politics and the cinema is probably one of the most vexatious questions to have occupied the academic discipline of film studies, and…
Yu, Hyun-mok (1925–2009)
Yu Hyun-mok belonged to the first generation of postliberation filmmakers in South Korea, and is known for films inspired by Italian neorealism that unsparingly depicted…
Porter, Edwin S. (1870–1941)
Edwin Stanton Porter was an American film exhibitor, producer, and director. He started his career in cinema in 1896 as a traveling exhibitor and moved…
Griffith, David Wark (1875–1948)
American film director D.W. Griffith was a pivotal figure in cinema’s ascendance as a mass medium and modern art form. He is best known for…
Slapstick Comedy
The term “slapstick comedy” refers to film comedies in which the humor relies upon physical gags and stunts. The slapstick—a wooden paddle to which a…
Zheng Zhengqiu (郑正秋) (1889–1935)
Zheng Zhengqiu (Chinese: 郑正秋, born as Zheng Fangze, 郑芳泽) (December 4, 1889 to July 16, 1935) was a Chinese filmmaker and screenwriter, and one of…
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), an experimental film by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, is considered an American avant-garde watershed. The husband–wife team played the…
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948) is a neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, considered modern and revolutionary because it radically broke with pre-World…
Ménilmontant (1925)
Ménilmontant is a 38-minute black and white avant-garde French film directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. Its narrative develops solely through images and montage, without the support…
Zigomar
Zigomar was the criminal mastermind of French writer Léon Sazie’s eponymous serial novel, or feuilleton, which appeared in the newspaper Le Matin between 1909 and…
Rohmer, Éric (1920–2010)
Éric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie-Maurice Schéer) was a French film director, screenwriter, and film critic, best known for his association with the French New Wave, and…
Truffaut, François (1932–1984)
François Truffaut was a French film director, actor, and film critic, best known for being one of the founders of the French New Wave—a movement…
Barnet, Boris (1902–1965)
Boris Barnet (b. June 18, 1902, Moscow, Russia; d. January 8, 1965, Riga, Latvia) was a Russian actor, director, and professional boxer. He made his…
Epstein, Jean (1897–1953)
Born in Warsaw in 1897 to a Jewish Franco-Polish family, Jean Epstein was an early queer filmmaker, poet, and theorist. Epstein is best remembered for…
Ophüls, Max (1902–1957)
Max Ophüls is an important critic and filmmaker of the postwar period, known for his opulent set design, kinetic long-takes, and proto-feminist melodramas, a source…
Lumière, Auguste (1862–1954) and Lumière, Louis (1864–1948)
The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, invented the Cinématographe, a motion picture camera and projector, and used it to create the film La Sortie des…
Le Film d’Art
Film d’Art was a French production company founded in February 1908 by businessman Paul Lafitte and backed by Pathé. The company united playwright Henri Lavedan…
Wright, Basil (1907–1987)
Basil Wright was a prominent figure in the British documentary film movement. He attended the first screening of John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), which amplified his…
Cohl, Emile (1857–1938)
Emile Cohl (Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet), a renowned caricaturist and pioneering filmmaker born in Paris, is often credited with inventing the animated cartoon. In…