International silent cinema

While Hollywood built a powerful industry in the 1910s and 1920s, filmmakers in Europe and Asia developed strikingly different ideas about what cinema could be. German Expressionism turned sets and lighting into images of inner states. Soviet filmmakers made editing the core of their art and their politics. French Impressionist and avant-garde filmmakers explored subjective experience and rhythm. Scandinavian cinema drew poetry from landscape, and Japanese cinema developed its own traditions, including live narrators. This lesson surveys these movements, explains what made each distinct, and traces their influence on cinema ever since.

Why national cinemas diverged

Several forces pushed national cinemas in different directions after the First World War. Europe's industries had been disrupted by the war while American films flooded their markets. Governments and producers responded by supporting films that offered something Hollywood did not: artistic ambition, national culture or political purpose. Intellectual and artistic movements in painting, theater, literature and architecture, such as Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism, shaped how filmmakers thought about images. And different economic systems, from private companies in Germany and France to state-run production in the Soviet Union, encouraged different kinds of experimentation.

Silent film also traveled easily across languages. Intertitles could be translated and replaced, so films from one country could be shown almost anywhere. This made the silent era unusually international: filmmakers saw and borrowed from one another's work, and many moved between countries.

German Expressionism

German Expressionist cinema emerged in the years after the First World War. Its best-known film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene, tells of a sinister showman and a sleepwalker who commits murders. Its painted sets are made of sharp angles, tilted walls, distorted windows and painted shadows. Nothing looks natural; the world itself appears to express madness and fear.

Characteristic features of Expressionist films include:

• Stylized, often painted or exaggerated sets with distorted perspective.
• Strong contrasts of light and shadow, including shadows used as characters.
• Stylized, sometimes mechanical acting.
• Themes of madness, doubles, tyranny, fate and the supernatural.

Other key films include F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula shot partly on real locations, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), a vast science-fiction spectacle of a city divided between rich rulers and underground workers. Metropolis was heavily cut after its premiere; a print found in Buenos Aires in 2008 allowed restorers to recover most of the missing footage, a good example of how film history changes when lost material resurfaces.

German cinema of the 1920s also developed the "unchained camera": moving the camera freely through space, as in Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), which tells its story almost entirely without intertitles. Studios such as Ufa had well-equipped facilities and technicians who became famous for lighting and effects.

The influence of Expressionism spread widely. Many German filmmakers and technicians moved to Hollywood in the 1920s and especially after the Nazis took power in 1933, carrying Expressionist lighting and design into American horror films of the 1930s and, later, into film noir.

Soviet montage

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the new Soviet state nationalized the film industry in 1919 and saw cinema as a powerful tool for education and propaganda. Lenin is often quoted as calling cinema the most important of the arts for the new society. A shortage of film stock in the early years encouraged experiments in re-editing existing footage, and young filmmakers developed theories of montage, from the French word for assembly or editing.

Lev Kuleshov's workshop explored how the meaning of a shot depends on the shots around it. In the experiment now called the Kuleshov effect, the same neutral close-up of an actor was said to read as hunger, grief or desire depending on whether it was intercut with a bowl of soup, a coffin or a woman. Historians debate exactly how the original experiment was done, but the principle that viewers create meaning from the juxtaposition of shots became central to Soviet film theory.

Sergei Eisenstein argued that montage should create collision and conflict between shots, producing new ideas in the viewer's mind. His film Battleship Potemkin (1925), about a 1905 mutiny, contains the famous Odessa Steps sequence, in which soldiers fire on civilians. Eisenstein expands and fragments time through rapid cutting between marching soldiers, fleeing crowds, close-ups of faces and a runaway baby carriage, creating an overwhelming emotional and political effect. Other Soviet filmmakers developed their own approaches: Vsevolod Pudovkin emphasized linkage of shots to build narrative and character, and Dziga Vertov rejected fiction in favor of the "kino-eye", recording and rearranging real life, as in Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a dazzling city symphony that shows its own making.

The Soviet experiment was cut short. From the late 1920s, Stalin's government demanded films in the doctrine later called socialist realism, which favored clear stories, positive heroes and official messages. Formal experimentation was condemned as "formalism", and several filmmakers faced censorship or worse. Montage theory nevertheless spread worldwide and shaped documentary, advertising, music videos and action cinema.

French Impressionism and the avant-garde

In France, a group of filmmakers and critics in the 1920s, including Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, explored how cinema could convey subjective experience: memories, dreams, emotions and perceptions. Historians call them French Impressionists, by loose analogy with the painters. They used superimpositions, soft focus, distorting lenses, rhythmic editing and camera movement to show a character's inner state. Dulac's The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) depicts a woman's frustrated imagination; Gance's Napoléon (1927) used multiple-camera widescreen sequences and rapid cutting on an epic scale.

Alongside them, avant-garde artists made experimental films outside the commercial industry. Dadaist and Surrealist artists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger and Luis Buñuel with Salvador Dalí made short films that rejected conventional narrative, used shocking images and explored dreams and chance. Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Buñuel and Dalí remains one of the most famous examples, built on dream logic and disturbing imagery. These films laid foundations for experimental cinema throughout the century.

French cinema also produced Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), directed by a Danish filmmaker, which tells the story of Joan's trial largely in intense close-ups of faces. Long thought to exist only in incomplete versions, an original print was discovered in 1981 in a closet of a Norwegian psychiatric hospital.

Scandinavian and other European cinemas

In the 1910s and early 1920s, Swedish and Danish films were admired internationally. Swedish directors Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller made films that used landscape, weather and natural light to express human emotion, for example Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921), notable for its multiple-exposure ghost effects and flashback structure. Both directors were later recruited by Hollywood, as was the actress Greta Garbo, discovered by Stiller.

Italian cinema had led the world in historical spectacle before the First World War, with large-scale epics that influenced Griffith and others. British cinema in the 1920s produced the early films of Alfred Hitchcock, who learned from German techniques while working at the Ufa studios. Each European cinema negotiated between national traditions, artistic ambition and competition with Hollywood.

Japanese silent cinema

Japanese cinema developed distinct conventions rooted in Japanese theater and storytelling. Through the silent era and into the 1930s, screenings were accompanied by benshi, live narrators who stood beside the screen, explained the action, voiced characters and commented on the story. Popular benshi were stars in their own right, and their presence helped silent film remain commercially strong in Japan well after Hollywood converted to sound; many Japanese films were still made silent in the early 1930s.

Early Japanese films often featured onnagata, male actors playing female roles as in kabuki theater, until actresses became common in the 1920s. Genres split between jidaigeki, period dramas often featuring samurai, and gendaigeki, stories of contemporary life. Directors such as Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi began their careers in the silent era, and Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (1926), set in a mental hospital and influenced by European avant-garde film, is one of the most experimental films of the decade anywhere. Many Japanese silent films were lost in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, in fires and in wartime bombing.

Influence and exchange

None of these movements stayed inside national borders. Hollywood hired European directors, cinematographers and stars and absorbed their techniques; Soviet montage influenced documentary makers in Britain and Canada, including John Grierson, who would found the National Film Board of Canada; Surrealism shaped experimental film across the Americas; and Japanese filmmakers studied both Hollywood continuity and European art cinema. Film societies and specialized cinemas in Europe and North America in the 1920s screened foreign and experimental films for enthusiasts, laying the groundwork for later film clubs, archives and festivals.

In the United States, art theaters and film societies in New York and other cities screened European films in the 1920s, and the Museum of Modern Art founded its Film Library in 1935, collecting and circulating Soviet, German and French films that shaped generations of American filmmakers and critics.