Cinematic Visual Styles
Constraints of budget, censorship and equipment settled into habits of the image, and hard shadow, cut fragments and shooting in the street were the answers each one found.
Dictionary entry
- Film Noir 1940s–1950s / later revivals / Style
Cuts distrust, isolation and fatalism into the frame with low-key lighting, deep shadow, oblique composition, the city at night, reflections.
- German Expressionist Film 1919–1927 / Style
Warped sets, painted shadows and extreme contrast turned a character's inner state directly into landscape, bringing a scenery of the mind into cinema.
- Soviet Montage 1924–1930s / Technique
An editing theory that generates meaning from the collision of opposing shots. Meaning lives not in the single image but in the gap between two.
- Italian Neorealism 1943–1952 / Style
Cinema that left the studio to film non-professional actors in the street, taking postwar poverty and daily life as its subject and standing on the side of reality.
- French New Wave 1958–1968 / Style
Critics picked up cameras and went out into the street, using handheld shots, jump cuts and self-reference to turn the grammar of film into a playground.
- Direct Cinema late 1950s–1970s / Style
A documentary-film style using lightweight cameras, synchronous sound, and small crews to follow events with minimal intervention. It restrains explanatory narration, reenactment, and excessive lighting so handheld distance, location sound, and observation reveal relationships.