SILVER SCREEN

LOST CINEMAS: FILM MOVEMENTS LEFT BEHIND

CARLA SANDBERG

February 22, 2025

Hollywood, as we know, is a maze of roads not taken. The history of cinema is filled with strange, radical, half-realized experiments, some too far ahead of their time, others too threatening to the industry’s entrenched powers. For every film movement that reshaped the medium—the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, German Expressionism—there are others that flickered briefly, then were snuffed out by commercial pressures, cultural shifts, or plain old bad luck.

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If history had zigged instead of zagged, today’s cinematic landscape might look wildly different. Imagine a world where mainstream blockbusters are surrealistic fever dreams, where dialogue is optional, where Hollywood’s factory-like efficiency has given way to raw, anarchic experimentation. Some now-lost film movements were quashed before they could fully take root; others were absorbed and defanged, their sharp edges smoothed over to make them palatable for the multiplex.

One of the most tantalizing roads not taken was the silent film revival of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 was, by all conventional measures, a revolution—the talkie permanently altered the cinematic experience. But what’s often forgotten is that, for a moment, there was resistance. Directors like F. W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, and Sergei Eisenstein saw sound as a potential regression, a crutch that would shackle filmmakers to dialogue rather than pure visual storytelling.

A song of two humans

Their fears were not entirely misplaced. Silent cinema had evolved into an astonishingly sophisticated art form—one that relied on composition, movement, and editing to tell stories that transcended language barriers. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) remains one of the most visually poetic films ever made, a compelling argument in itself that cinema never needed words. Chaplin, for his part, held out longer than almost anyone, releasing City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) as silent films in a world that had otherwise decisively moved on.

Modern Times modern

But why couldn’t silent film have coexisted alongside talkies, evolving as its own parallel cinematic tradition? Imagine the possibilities: an entire Hollywood lineage of wordless, visually driven storytelling, as distinct from dialogue-heavy films as opera is from spoken theater. Instead, silence became a relic, a museum piece, an aesthetic choice so radical that even in the era of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and A Quiet Place (2018), which rely heavily on visual storytelling and minimal dialogue, mainstream audiences still think of silent cinema as a novelty.

The inauguration of Kenneth Anger

Another lost possibility was the US avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s, which, had it taken root, might have made Hollywood a fulfillingly stranger place. In the postwar years, a network of radical filmmakers emerged—Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage—who rejected narrative conventions in favor of pure, dreamlike expression. Their films were visceral, hallucinatory, and sometimes violent. Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) plays like a Lynchian nightmare two decades before David Lynch picked up a camera. Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961–64) is an ecstatic vision, a treatment of the medium itself as something organic, shifting, and alive.

But Hollywood had no use for these filmmakers. The studio system allowed no room for abstract, noncommercial work in a world driven by star power and mass appeal. Avant-garde cinema was exiled to the margins—college campuses, underground screenings, the occasional crossover into music videos or experimental advertising.

But what if Hollywood had embraced these surrealists instead of discarding them? What if, instead of clinging to three-act structures and neatly resolved narratives, mainstream US film had allowed for more mystery, more abstraction, more images that speak for themselves? Would we still be living in a world where every blockbuster must explain itself in expository dialogue, where every character announces their emotional state like a PowerPoint presentation?

Slaughterhouse  

Some lost film movements weren’t so much suppressed as simply born too early for their own good. The LA Rebellion, a movement of Black independent filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, sought to break away from Hollywood’s narrow, stereotyped portrayals of Black life. Directors like Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, 1978), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991), and Haile Gerima (Bush Mama, 1979) created films that were lyrical, politically charged, and defiantly anti-commercial. These films weren’t interested in respectability or easy narratives of racial struggle; they were about everyday existence, about rhythm, and about reclaiming cinematic language.

Had the LA Rebellion gained the institutional support it deserved, Hollywood might have evolved into a far more diverse, nuanced place much earlier. Instead, these filmmakers worked largely in obscurity, their influence trickling down into the independent film world rather than reshaping the mainstream. It would take decades for their aesthetic—naturalistic, politically engaged, sometimes poetic—to surface again in films like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016) or Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (2020), works that owe a debt to the pioneering efforts of the LA Rebellion filmmakers and continue their tradition of intimate, politically resonant storytelling.

Another movement that nearly took hold was hyperstylization. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a group of directors—Brian De Palma, Peter Greenaway, Wong Kar-wai, the early Coen brothers, and even the usually gritty Paul Schrader—pushed filmic language to its extremes, creating movies that were almost operatic in their use of color, composition, and movement. Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) set the tone for the decade, with its sleek surfaces, neon glow, and Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating synth score transforming film noir into a meditation on modern alienation. Every element—Richard Gere’s sculpted physique, the Armani suits, the glassy Los Angeles skyline—became part of a visual language where style wasn’t just an aesthetic choice but a form of existential expression. De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) followed with a grand gangster saga painted in bold, feverish strokes, every frame meticulously composed to convey the heightened drama of a classical epic. Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) took stylization even further, turning excess into both spectacle and critique, its painterly compositions and grotesque theatricality exposing the decadence and brutality beneath refined surfaces.

Sleek, melancholic, noir

For a while, it seemed like Hollywood might embrace this heightened visual language. Films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) showcase a world where style and substance coexist, and pushed the boundaries of what mainstream cinema could look like. But ultimately, the rise of gritty realism, shaky-cam aesthetics, and digital color grading washed out the textures they heralded. We ended up in a world where “gritty” became shorthand for “serious,” where every blockbuster had to look like it was shot on a cloudy day—desaturated, muted, embracing a somber palette that prioritizes realism over expressive, dreamlike imagery. This aesthetic sacrifices visual boldness for a faux-documentary immediacy, mimicking the aesthetics of so-called “serious” cinema even in genres that are inherently fantastical or escapist.

Running on a blade of sun

These lost film movements weren’t failures—they were roads that, for one reason or another, simply weren’t taken. Some were rejected outright, and others were swallowed up and rebranded. But they remain at the margins, in the archives, waiting for rediscovery. Because history doesn’t always move forward in a straight line. Sometimes, the past is just waiting to become the future.

Carla Sandberg was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and raised on a steady diet of late-night double features and out-of-print film theory books. She studied cinematography at the Łódź Film School before becoming a critic. With a soft spot for cinema’s abandoned experiments and Hollywood’s missed opportunities, she digs through the archives of forgotten auteurs, imagining the alternate timelines where their visions actually reshaped the industry.

Cover image: Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929