Styles of film

Styles of film 

The Silent Era

The Silent Era is marked as the birth of cinema when cinema was all about experimentation and pushing boundaries. All of the new discoveries of this era helped shape the eras that followed and the filmmakers and films that came after them. 

The Talkies

Once the first Vitaphone film with sound was released in 1927 (The Jazz Singer), everything changed. Filmmakers had to adapt to the new technology and actors had to adapt as well. Some actors had to quit because their voices did not match well with their image and the audience didn’t like them anymore. Others couldn’t find work because their acting was too over-the-top and theatrical (as it needs to be in silent films, but not in sound films). 

French cinema in the 1930s

French films made in these years reflected how ordinary people were dealing with the war. They employed poetic realism, meaning that they treated real subjects in an imaginative way.  

Post-War Italy

Italian filmmakers dealt with the aftermath of the war differently from those in the US; their work became what we now call Neorealism. They highlighted actual problems faced by ordinary people after the war.