1920s

Erich VonStroheim emigrated from Austria to America, and soon gained a reputation for over-indulgence. His film budgets quadrupled, and the excessive running-times of his films were drastically cut before distribution. Greed (1924), for example, lasted over nine hours in rough-cut. French director Abel Gance's films (notably La Roue from 1923 and the 'biopic' Napoleon from 1927) were similarly extravagant. Napoleon had a running-time of over five hours, and was projected using the Polyvision system: three screens were used, enabling incredible panoramic images to be presented.

Polyvision was influenced by the ten-projector panoramas of Cineorama, and it inspired the American Cinerama process of the 1950s. However, the most important technical innovation of the 1920s related not to the screen but to the soundtrack: the sporadic lines of spoken dialogue in Alan Crosland's 'talkie' The Jazz Singer in 1927 caused an instant sensation. However, The Jazz Singer was retrogressive rather than progressive; it's 'soundtrack' was recorded not on the film itself but on a separate disc. True optical sound had in fact been demonstrated as early as 1921, by Charles Hoxie, and Oskar Messter produced Tonbilders (films with synchronised sound) in the 1900s.

American film production in the early 1920s was increasingly consolidated around a small number of film studios, all based in Hollywood, which became synonymous with the American film industry. This system of classical Hollywood studio production survived until the 1960s, when it would be challenged by the increasing popularity of television and the rise of independent film production.

Charlie Chaplin's silent comedy shorts of the 1910s developed into feature-films in the 1920s and 1930s, notably The Gold Rush (1925) and Modern Times (1936). Buster Keaton's The General (1927, directed by Keaton and Clyde Bruckman) is another enduring silent comedy. Other Hollywood stars of the era included sex-symbol Rudolph Valentino, whose most popular leading role was in the exotic drama The Sheik (George Melford, 1921). In contrast to the decadence of Hollywood's emerging star and studio systems was Robert Flaherty's humanist documentary Nanook Of The North (1922).

Weimar Expressionism

German Expressionismus, the cinema's first avant-garde movement, emphasised atmosphere at the expense of realism. Angular, distorted designs, including artificial light and shadow formations, were painted directly onto the set walls. Actors were encouraged to create wildly stylised performances. Unconventional camera angles were employed. Elements of the Expressionismus style would later appear in the films of Orson Welles, in Universal's 1930s horror films, and in Film Noir. Fritz Lang's superproduction Metropolis (1926) almost bankrupted Germany's premier studio, UFA. Lang also made the two-part mythological epic Die Nibelungen (I: Siegfried, 1924; II: Kriemhilds Rache, 1924) and the chilling M (1931), and later produced a series of Hollywood thrillers including The Big Heat (1953). FW Murnau directed Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (1921) and the naturalistic Kammerspielfilm Der Letzte Mann (1924) in Germany, and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927) in America, only to be killed in a road accident a few years later.

In contrast to Expressionismus's extreme stylisation was a series of German Neue Sachlichkeit films, beginning with Die Strasse (Karl Grune, 1923) and Die Freudlose Gasse (GW Pabst, 1925). The films of this period were concerned with poverty-stricken life on the streets, hence they are known as Strassenfilme ('street films'). Simultaneously, DW Griffith also made a Strassenfilm, Isn't Life Wonderful? (1924), filmed on location in Germany.

Films in Germany (either German films or films released in German cinemas) are classified into a variety of specific genres and sub-genres, including Staatsauftragsfilme (historical patriotism), Schauerfilme (fantasy), Kriegsfilme (war), Spielfilme (espionage), Fernsehfilme (TV movies), Actionfilme (action), Problemfilme (social drama), Kriminalfilme (crime), Horrorfilme (horror), Science-Fiction-Filme (science-fiction), Abenteuerfilme (adventure), Piratenfilme (piracy), Ritterfilme (chivalry), Historienfilme (history), Antikfilme (ancient history), and Mantel-Und-Degen-Filme (cloak-and-dagger).

Japanese Cinema

With the introduction of sustained narratives to Japanese cinema, the country's film industry began to polarise into two distinct styles: Gendai-Geki (dramas with contemporary settings, initially influenced by German Expressionismus and also known as Gendai-Mono) and Jidai-Geki (period dramas influenced by Kyu-Geki historical films, also known as Jidai-Mono). Kichizo Chiba's Onoga Tsumi (1909) is one of the earliest examples of Gendai-Geki.

One of the earliest Jidai-Geki films is Chushingura (1907), by Ryo Konishi. Another, Bansho Kanamori's Yuki-Yoe Shi: Murasaki Zukin (1923), is also an early example of the Ken-Geki genre (Samurai sword-fighting films, also known as Chambara). Daisuke Ito's Chuji Tabi Nikki: Goyo Hen (1927) represents the pinnacle of early Jidai-Geki cinema and is also a Yakuza-Geki prototype.

Shomin-Geki films (comedies of social observation about lower-middle-class life, also known as Shoshimin-Geki) by Yasujiro Shimazu include Otosan (1923). The Shomin-Geki social comedies led to a series of satirical comedies known as Modan-Mono, such as Yutaka Abe's Ashi Ni Sawatta Onna (1926).

A group of overtly Marxist films, known as Keiko-Eiga, were swiftly suppressed by the Japanese authorities. Amongst them was Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokai Kokyogaku (1929). One of the final Keiko-Eiga films was Shigekichi Suzuki's Nani Gakanojo Wo So Saretaka (1930), the highest-grossing film in Japanese silent cinema. Sadly, the vast majority of Japan's silent films are now no longer extant.

Surrealism And Abstraction

In France, Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer made La Passion De Jeanne D'Arc (1928) and Spaniard Luis Bunuel (with minimal assistance from artist Salvador Dali) gained entry into the Paris Surrealist group with Un Chien Andalou (1928). The latter film, an iconoclastic masterpiece of enigmatic, shocking, and deliberately provocative dream imagery, features a woman's eye being sliced open with a razor, ants crawling from a hole in a man's hand, and dead donkeys lying on pianos.

Absolute films, influenced by the Dada art movement, included Rhythmus '21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Diagonalsymphonien (Viking Eggeling, 1921), Entr'acte (Rene Clair, 1924), and Lichtspiel Opus I (Walther Ruttmann, 1921; the first abstract film screened to the public). The Dada artists Marcel Duchamp (Anaemic Cinema, 1925) and Man Ray (La Retour A La Raison, 1923) also made experimental films at this time.

Many of these semi-abstract art films are examples of cinematic Impressionisme, juxtaposing images to give them new meanings as the Montazh theorists in Russia would later advocate. Fernand Leger's Le Ballet Mecanique (1924) was another experimental semi-abstract film, specifically influenced by Russian Montazh editing. Total abstraction was achieved by Henri Chomette, the French director whose works of Cinema-Pur included Cinq Minutes De Cinema-Pur (1925), depicting abstract patterns of light.

Soviet Montage

Impressionisme in film was made possible by the work of Lev Kuleshov, the Russian director who investigated the psychological impact of Montazh, the juxtaposition of images. Kuleshov intercut a picture of Ivan Mozhukhin's expressionless face with images of a bowl of soup, a dead body in a coffin, and a little girl. After the shot of the soup, audiences perceived the face as appearing hungry; it was perceived as mournful after the shot of the coffin; finally, it was viewed as happy after the little girl. Thus, Kuleshov discovered that editing could alter the meaning of images.

Following in the tradition of the agit-trains which projected Agitki political propaganda to Russian peasants, theorist Sergei Eisenstein harnessed the political potential of Kuleshov's Montazh. Eisenstein published several essays on Montazh, the first being Montazh Attraktsionov in 1923. He was then commissioned by the Russian government to produce cinematic commemorations of the Russian Revolutions: Stachka (1925), Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925), and Oktyabr (1928). Bronenosets Potyomkin, which dramatised the 1905 naval revolt at Odessa, contains arguably the most celebrated sequence in silent cinema: the massacre on the Odessa Steps. Eisenstein was later commissioned by Joseph Stalin to make Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938). Alongside Eisenstein, Russia's greatest directors of the silent era were Vsevolod Pudovkin (Mat, 1926) and Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Zemlya, 1930).

Following the German invasion during World War II, Russian cinema was again harnessed for propagandist purposes, with a series of short films known collectively as Kinosborniki. The first of these anti-Nazi shorts was Boyevoy Kinosbornik I, directed by Sergei Gerasimov, I Mutanov, and Y Nekrasov in 1941. The Russian public, however, were eager for escapism rather than propaganda, and the most successful films were glamorous Kolkhoz musicals such as Tsirk (Grigori Aleksandrov, 1936).

While Eisenstein used Montazh to simulate and heighten reality, Dziga Vertov's Kinoki philosophy saw it as a tool for the manipulation of realism. Vertov published a series of manifestos (such as My: Variant Manifesta, 1922), though his outstanding contribution to cinema is Chelovek S Kinoapparatom from 1929. The film is essentially a City Symphony documentary about everyday life in Moscow, though it uses techniques such as split-screen, double-exposure, trick editing, stop-motion, and freeze-frames to constantly remind the audience of the camera's presence. (Walther Ruttmann had previously directed a City Symphony about Berlin, Berlin: Die Symphonie Einer Grosstadt, in 1927; the first example was Alberto Cavalcanti's study of Paris, Rien Que Les Heures from 1926.)

The innovations of Russian Montazh and the French avant-garde were part of a general modernist movement throughout the arts, and Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (1923) is a clear example of this trend - it is resolutely modernist in its set design, though its outstanding artistic radicalism (like that of the overtly Expressionistic Caligari) inevitably made it commercially unsuccessful.