While today film theory is considered part of an academic discipline, earlier writers on the topic came from many contexts and traditions such as psychology or journalism. Early film theorists examined cinema’s relation to language and to other art forms, and questioned whether film is inherently a realist medium.

In the 1910s and 1920s in France, the first avant-garde film movement, impressionism, was fostered by groups known as ciné-clubs and by journals dedicated to the new medium. Film theorist Louis Delluc coined the term photogénie to refer to a particular quality that distinguishes the filmed object from its everyday reality.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, a group of artist-intellectuals in the Soviet Union set about defining an artistic practice that could participate in revolutionary change. Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein elaborated the theory of montage in their writings and films. Montage is a way of breaking down a scene to direct the spectator’s perception and understanding. Eisenstein’s theory emphasized how the “collision” between two images could create a third meaning.

Filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the Kinoki, or “cinema-eye” group, also contributed to film theory with their manifestos that emphasized the movie camera’s ability to overcome limitations of the human eye, therefore creating a new way of seeing.

One of the organizing debates of classical film theory centers around the appeal to realism made first by photography and then by film. Realism in the arts, generally speaking, relates to mimesis, or imitation of reality. For theorists such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, film’s ability to refer to the world through images that resemble and record the presence of objects and sources of sounds sets it apart as a realist medium. Other film theorists such as Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim championed formalist theories of film. These formalists were especially interested in how film became an art form precisely by transcending its referential qualities.

Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar-era contemporary, was particularly interested in how cinema participated in the transformation of perception in the modern world. Film, Benjamin argued, captured the sense of accelerated time and effortlessly traversed spaces typical of contemporary urban life.