Epoch Canon

Film history as a sequence of exhibition chapters.

The epochs section now moves away from category logic and toward curated movements, each conceived as a self-contained room in a digital film museum: historically framed, visually distinct, and tightly connected to the canon of directors and films.

Foundations

The forms that taught cinema how to see

Early movements and industrial systems that established the visual, spatial, and rhythmic grammar of film.

1895-1929

Silent Era

The formative decades in which cinema discovered scale, rhythm, gesture, and visual storytelling before synchronized dialogue became dominant.

1919-1931

German Expressionism

A cinema of shadows, distorted spaces, and psychological dread that turned mise-en-scene into a language of interior states.

1924-1930

Soviet Montage

A revolutionary cinema of collision, rhythm, and political form in which editing becomes the engine of meaning.

1927-1960

Classical Hollywood

The studio era at its most fluent: narrative clarity, star presence, genre architecture, and visual elegance at industrial scale.

Postwar Revolutions

When film culture became newly self-aware

Humanist, modernist, and international movements that remade the canon after the war.

1943-1954

Italian Neorealism

A postwar cinema of streets, labor, fragility, and moral gravity that brought ordinary life back to the center of the frame.

1948-1963

Classical Japanese Cinema

A period of compositional exactitude, moral gravity, and extraordinary control in which Japanese cinema attained global canonical stature.

1958-1967

French New Wave

A new cinephile modernity of street-level freedom, restless form, and authorial self-awareness that reoriented postwar cinema.

1950-1985

European Art Cinema

Modern cinema at its most introspective: ambiguity, spiritual inquiry, fractured time, and exacting formal authorship.

Late Modern and Contemporary

The afterlives of authorship, genre, and cinephilia

From American reinvention to global art-and-genre crosscurrents, these chapters map the modern present.

1967-1980

New Hollywood

American cinema in a newly volatile state: auteur ambition, moral ambiguity, paranoia, and formal risk under studio pressure.

1980-2005

Postmodern Cinema

A cinema of quotation, fragmentation, genre play, and unstable tone in the aftermath of classical certainty.

2000-present

Contemporary Cinema

A global field of major contemporary auteurs whose films move between festival prestige, genre reinvention, and transnational circulation.