From the first projections onward.
12 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Art of the Moving Picture
Vachel Lindsay · 1915
Argues motion pictures deserve to be judged as a genuine new art form alongside architecture, sculpture and painting, and sketches a hierarchy of…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925
Terry Ramsaye · 1926
Traces the birth of American cinema as a story of patents, hustlers and showmen battling for control of the new medium, arguing the industry's…
+6 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History
Lewis Jacobs · 1939
Argues American cinema's silent-era growth was driven as much by industrial and economic forces — nickelodeons, monopolies, the star system — as by…
+6 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Vachel Lindsay
Argues motion pictures deserve to be judged as a genuine new art form alongside architecture, sculpture and painting, and sketches a hierarchy of photoplay types to make the case.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Terry Ramsaye
Traces the birth of American cinema as a story of patents, hustlers and showmen battling for control of the new medium, arguing the industry's founding shape came from business warfare rather than any single inventor's vision.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cesare Zavattini
Argues neorealism should abandon invented plots altogether and film the real duration of ordinary events, because reality itself is more dramatically rich than anything a screenwriter can invent.
François Truffaut
Attacks the postwar French 'tradition of quality' for treating directors as mere illustrators of literary scripts, and argues a film's true author is the director who controls its style.
Paul Schrader
Argues film noir is not a genre but a period style defined by visual tone — low-key lighting, disorienting compositions, voice-over fatalism — running across genres in postwar Hollywood.
Peter Krämer
Argues the industry's pivot toward youth-driven, high-concept blockbusters after 1967 was a calculated response to collapsing audiences, not the accidental byproduct of a few directors' personal visions.
Marijke de Valck
Argues the international film festival circuit is not a neutral marketplace for discovering good films but a self-perpetuating system, born of Cold War cultural diplomacy, that itself manufactures which films count as art cinema.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Bordwell
Argues the shift from film reels to digital files reorganised the entire chain of production, distribution and exhibition, not just the camera and projector at either end.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lewis Jacobs
Argues American cinema's silent-era growth was driven as much by industrial and economic forces — nickelodeons, monopolies, the star system — as by any individual artist's vision.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Siegfried Kracauer
Argues Weimar cinema's recurring images of tyranny and chaos, from Caligari to Mabuse, expressed a collective German psychology that later found its outlet in Nazism.
David Bordwell
Argues Soviet montage theory was never a single unified doctrine but a contested set of positions — Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Kuleshov each grounding editing's power in a different account of perception and meaning, borrowed from rival Constructivist and Formalist theories of art.
Dziga Vertov
Argues the camera's mechanical eye can perceive truths about the world invisible to the unaided human eye, and calls for a cinema built entirely from documentary fragments rather than staged fiction.