World Cinema Classics: A Beginner’s Map of the Great Film Movements

The first time I sat through a subtitled black-and-white film on purpose, I chose badly. It was a late, difficult work by a famous director, and I spent most of it wondering what everyone else saw in it. The problem was not the film. It was that I had walked into the middle of a conversation. World cinema classics make much more sense when you know which movement a film belongs to, what it was reacting against and who was watching whom. This map is meant to give you that conversation in order.

Why movements, not lists

“Best foreign films” lists are useful, but they flatten history. Most of the films on them came out of short, intense periods when a group of filmmakers in one country shared a set of ideas, often a common enemy, and sometimes the same café table. Knowing the movement tells you what to look for. A neorealist film asks you to notice ordinary streets and non-professional faces. A New Wave film expects you to notice the editing. An Expressionist film wants you to notice that the walls are painted at impossible angles. Once you know the game, the films stop feeling like homework.

Below are ten movements in roughly chronological order, each with one starter film. You do not have to watch them in sequence, but the order shows how each generation borrowed from the last.

The map: ten movements and where to start

The silent roots: Germany and the Soviet Union

Two movements of the 1920s still shape how films look and how they are cut. In Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari put its story of a sleepwalker and a sinister showman inside painted sets of slanted doors and jagged shadows. The style, borrowed from Expressionist painting and theater, turned the setting into a picture of a disturbed mind. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Lang’s Metropolis (1927) carried the influence further, and when many German film artists later moved to Hollywood, the shadows came with them. You can see the line run straight into American crime films of the 1940s, the subject of the film noir cycle.

The Soviet filmmakers were interested in something else: what happens when you cut one image against another. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, made for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 mutiny, builds its famous Odessa Steps sequence from rapid, clashing shots rather than one continuous view. Directors around the world studied it, and the idea that meaning lives in the edit, not just in the shot, became part of every film school curriculum. If you are new to silent film altogether, start with the comedies of the same decade before tackling the heavier dramas.

Poetic realism: France before the war

In the 1930s, French studios produced a cycle of moody, fatalistic dramas about working people, deserters and doomed lovers, often set in fog-bound ports and cheap hotels. Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes), with Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, is the classic example. Jean Renoir worked in a looser, warmer register, and his Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are on nearly every list of the greatest films ever made. The New Wave critics of the 1950s would later dismiss much of French studio cinema, but they made a large exception for Renoir.

After the war: Italy and Japan

The Second World War broke film industries apart, and two of the most important responses came from defeated countries. In Italy, filmmakers took cameras into bomb-damaged streets and cast ordinary people alongside professionals. The result, neorealism, produced Rome, Open City (1945), Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. (1952), and it changed what audiences everywhere expected a serious film to look like. I cover the movement in depth in Italian neorealism: the films and the directors.

Japan had a mature studio system long before the war, but the West discovered it suddenly when Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951. Over the following decade, Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi made film after film that now anchors the canon, from Seven Samurai (1954) to Ugetsu (1953). The full story is in our guide to the golden age of Japanese cinema.

India’s other cinema

Indian popular cinema was already one of the largest in the world by the 1950s, but a separate tradition grew up beside it. Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), the first part of his Apu trilogy, followed a poor Bengali family with a patience and quiet attention that owed a clear debt to neorealism; Ray had been deeply struck by Bicycle Thieves. Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen followed different, often more political paths. Indian regional industries have rich histories of their own, too, from Bengali and Tamil cinema to the smaller Odia industry.

The New Waves of the 1960s

The late 1950s and 1960s were the age of new waves, and France set the template. A group of young critics at the magazine Cahiers du cinéma became directors and made cheap, fast, personal films that broke rules about continuity and storytelling. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless (1960) are the usual entry points, and our guide to the French New Wave covers the rest.

The example spread quickly. In Czechoslovakia, a generation trained at the Prague film school, FAMU, made playful, sly and sometimes surreal films during a brief loosening of censorship. Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) is still one of the most anarchic films ever made. In Brazil, Cinema Novo directors adopted the motto “a camera in the hand and an idea in the head,” usually credited to Glauber Rocha, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas Secas, about a family driven across the drought-stricken northeast, remains the most approachable way in.

West Germany came last. In 1962 a group of young filmmakers signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, declaring the old commercial cinema dead. Within a decade Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders had built international reputations. Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, about a Spanish expedition losing its mind on the Amazon, is a good place to begin.

How to watch your way through the map

If you want a simple plan, try this order for your first ten films:

1. Bicycle Thieves (1948). Short, clear and emotionally direct, it is the easiest door into the whole territory.
2. Tokyo Story (1953). Slower, but it rewards patience more than almost any film I know.
3. The 400 Blows (1959). A childhood story that explains the New Wave without lectures.
4. Pather Panchali (1955). Watch it soon after Bicycle Thieves and the family resemblance is obvious.
5. Seven Samurai (1954). Long, but it moves like an action film.
6. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Go back to the silent roots once you are comfortable with subtitles.
7. Battleship Potemkin (1925). Watch the Odessa Steps sequence twice.
8. Port of Shadows (1938). Then compare it with any 1940s film noir.
9. Closely Watched Trains (1966). Funny, tender and surprisingly sharp.
10. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). A strange, hypnotic end to the tour.

Many of these titles are distributed in restored editions, and they turn up regularly at repertory cinemas and film societies. Where to see them depends on where you live, so check licensed services and local cinematheques.

A few honest warnings

Movements are labels applied by critics, often after the fact. Directors frequently rejected them, and the dates in the table above are approximate. Rossellini, Ozu and Renoir all made films that fit no movement at all. Treat the map as a way of getting your bearings, not as a set of boxes.

And do not feel obliged to like everything. Some of these films will hit you immediately and some will take a second viewing ten years later. That is part of the pleasure of world cinema classics: they keep changing as you do.