Movements
Forty-five movements, forms and techniques the filmmakers in this guide worked in. Each gets a plain explanation and the people and films behind it.
Movements and scenes
Groups, scenes and labels that gathered filmmakers together. Some were named by the filmmakers, others by critics.
Absolute film
The German abstract film of the 1920s: shape, line and light moved to rhythm with no story, named after absolute music.
Cinéma vérité
Documentary that admits the camera is there, and treats what filming does to people as part of the truth.
Czech New Wave
The funny, absurd and often defiant films a generation of young Czechoslovak directors made in the 1960s, until the tanks of 1968 ended it.
Dada
The anti-art movement born in a Zurich cabaret in 1916, which answered the First World War with nonsense, chance and provocation.
Feminist film
Films that take apart how cinema looks at women, and make room for women's lives, bodies and histories told on their own terms.
French Impressionist cinema
Paris filmmakers of the 1920s who used close-ups, superimposition, distortion and fast cutting to put a character's feelings and memories on screen.
Independent animation
Animation made outside the studios, usually by one person or a small team, and often released by the filmmakers themselves.
Mexican cinema
The film industry of Mexico, where Luis Buñuel made about twenty films after settling there in 1946.
New American Cinema
The New York independents who, from 1960, organised to make, distribute and show films outside Hollywood.
Performance art
Art made from live action, usually the artist's own body, staged for an audience or for the camera.
Queer cinema
Films by and about queer people, made long before the industry would show their lives on screen, and often in defiance of it.
Senegalese cinema
The films of Senegal, from African students shooting in Paris in 1955 to Dakar's directors, who made some of the first features by sub-Saharan Africans.
Slow cinema
Films built from long takes and real time, where the waiting is the point.
Structural film
Films whose shape is the subject: a single zoom, a rule, a rhythm of frames, set up in advance and followed through.
Surrealism
The movement launched in Paris in 1924 to free the unconscious, whose artists saw in film a machine for dreams.
Ukrainian poetic cinema
The folkloric, image-drunk films that came out of Kyiv's Dovzhenko Studio in the 1960s and early 1970s, against the rules of socialist realism.
Underground film
The name the press gave American experimental film in the 1960s, when it moved into midnight screenings, court cases and the culture pages.
Video art
Art made with video, from the first portable cameras of the 1960s to the gallery installations and long-form works that followed.
Forms and genres
Kinds of film, named for what happens on screen, whoever made them.
Abstract animation
Animation without characters or objects: pure shape, line and colour set in motion.
Analog horror
Horror told through fake broadcasts, VHS tapes and emergency alerts posted online, where the degraded format carries the dread.
Cine-dance
A name used in the 1960s for films that made the dancer and the camera equal partners.
City symphony
Documentary portraits of a city, often over a single day, cut to rhythm like music, with no actors or plot.
Collage film
Films that cut unrelated images and sounds together, so meaning comes from the collisions between them.
Diary film
Films made from the filmmaker's own life, shot as it happens and shaped, often years later, into a personal record.
Essay film
Films that think aloud: the filmmaker works through an idea, mixing footage, archive, text and voice the way a writer builds an essay.
Experimental animation
Animation that breaks from the cartoon: new materials, new techniques, or subjects animation isn't supposed to touch.
Feminist fairy tale
Cecelia Condit's own name for her videos, which retell stories about women, desire and violence with humour and horror at once.
Flicker film
Films built from rapid changes between single frames, often of plain black, white or colour, that work directly on the eye.
Hand-drawn animation
Animation drawn by hand, picture by picture, with the drawing itself left visible on screen.
Kinetic sculpture
Sculpture that moves, driven by motors, wind or the viewer, so time becomes part of the work.
Landscape film
Films where place is the subject: land, weather and light watched closely, usually with few people or none.
Lyrical film
Films in which the camera becomes the filmmaker's eye, and the screen fills with how they see.
No-budget film
Features made with almost no money, often by one person, with friends, neighbours and whatever is at hand.
Screendance
Dance made for the camera, where the cut and the frame are part of the choreography.
Trance film
Films where a dreamer drifts through a world that runs on the logic of sleep, and the camera follows them in.
Visual music
Moving abstraction composed like music, with shape, colour and rhythm in place of melody and harmony.
Techniques
Ways of making the image, from the optical printer to scratching the film strip by hand.
Assemblage
Art built from found objects and scraps, and its film equivalent, made from found images set side by side.
Direct animation
Animation made straight onto the film strip, painted or scratched frame by frame, with no camera involved.
Found footage
Films made from footage someone else shot, such as newsreels, home movies and Hollywood outtakes, re-cut until it says something new.
Hand-made film
Films made by working the film strip by hand: painting, scratching, collaging or processing it yourself.
Optical printing
Rephotographing film onto film, with a projector aimed into a camera, so images can be layered, slowed, recoloured or remade.
Photochemical film
Films made with the physical materials of film, its emulsion, chemistry and printers, rather than digital tools.
Pixilation
Stop-motion animation with people instead of puppets: actors hold still for each frame, so they can glide, float and slide without moving their feet.
Stop-motion
Animation made by photographing objects or images one frame at a time, moving them a little between shots.
Superimposition
Two or more images exposed onto the same frame, so they appear at once, one seen through another.