Every visual choice available to a modern cinematographer was pioneered by a movement that broke the rules of its day. Expressionist shadows, neorealist streets, new wave handheld, Dogme’s stripped-back honesty: these are the toolkits directors and DPs still reach for. This guide collects the site’s essays on the movements that changed how films look, what defined each one, and what survives of them in current work.
- German Expressionism in Cinematography
- Italian Neorealism in Post-War Cinema
- The French New Wave
- The British New Wave
- New Hollywood
- The Australian New Wave
- The Hong Kong New Wave
- Dogme 95
- The Art of Slow Cinema
- What Is Mumblecore?
- The Rise of Korean Cinema
Frequently asked questions
What is Dogme 95?
Dogme 95 was a filmmaking movement founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Its manifesto, the Vow of Chastity, banned artificial lighting, added music, props and other conventions to force focus onto story and performance. Its fingerprints are on every stripped-back, naturalistic drama made since.
What defines the French New Wave?
Location shooting, available light, handheld cameras, jump cuts and a director-led approach that treated film grammar as something to be reinvented. Emerging in late 1950s France through Godard, Truffaut and their contemporaries, it made lightweight cameras and fast stocks into a visual style of their own.
Why do film movements matter to cinematographers?
Because they are proven visual systems. Knowing why Expressionism used shadow, why neorealism shot on streets, or why Dogme banned lights gives a cinematographer a vocabulary of looks with built-in meaning, ready to be quoted, adapted or deliberately broken.