When the Lumière Brothers' Cinématographe arrived in Kobe in 1896, Japan encountered moving images for the first time. What began as a foreign novelty quickly transformed into something distinctly Japanese. This essay explores cinema's first dozen years in Japan—a period of experimentation, adaptation, and cultural synthesis that laid the foundation for one of the world's most influential film traditions. From early actuality films to the emergence of the benshi narrator, from kabuki-influenced staging to the development of uniquely Japanese storytelling techniques, these formative years reveal how Japan didn't simply adopt cinema—it reimagined it. Before Kurosawa, before Ozu, before the Golden Age, there was this: the awakening.

While Paris burned and millions of French workers walked off the job, the film world's most glamorous event continued with champagne receptions and yacht parties. The contrast was obscene. In an act of solidarity with striking students and workers, the directors who had revolutionized cinema rushed the stage of the Palais des Festivals. Carlos Saura grabbed the curtains to prevent them from opening. Fistfights erupted. Godard lost his glasses. Within hours, the festival was cancelled—the only time in its history outside of World War II.

This wasn't just a protest. It was the moment when French cinema's aesthetic revolution collided head-on with political upheaval, forcing filmmakers to ask an impossible question: In revolutionary times, does art matter?

From the Langlois Affair to Costa-Gavras's Z, from Godard's Dziga Vertov Group to the birth of Directors' Fortnight, discover how May '68 changed cinema forever—and why the filmmakers who built the barricades could never agree on what came next.

In 1950s Paris, a group of passionate young film critics plotted a revolution with nothing but notebooks, cheap cameras, and an audacious idea: that cinema could be written like literature. From Agnès Varda's pioneering La Pointe Courte to Godard's anarchic Breathless and Truffaut's autobiographical The 400 Blows, the French New Wave transformed the camera into a pen. It proved that personal vision mattered more than studio budgets, that breaking rules could create new languages, and that the most powerful films come from filmmakers who love cinema enough to reinvent it completely.

Before the opening scene, before the first line of dialogue, there was an art form that set the stage for everything to follow: the title sequence. From the 1950s through the 1980s, designers like Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, and Robert Brownjohn transformed opening credits into miniature masterpieces—kinetic, atmospheric, and essential to the film's identity. Bass's spiraling graphics for Vertigo, the haunting simplicity of To Kill a Mockingbird, the playful cat-and-mouse elegance of Catch Me If You Can—these weren't mere lists of names but carefully crafted overtures that established tone, built anticipation, and signaled that something special was about to unfold. This essay explores the golden age of title design, examines why this art form has largely disappeared from contemporary cinema, and celebrates the designers who understood that how a film begins is just as important as what it becomes.

Why do films from the 1940s look more vivid than movies made last year?

The answer is three-strip Technicolor—a process so expensive and complicated that it required splitting light through prisms, printing three separate negatives, and transferring dyes with microscopic precision. For forty years, it created the most gorgeous images ever committed to celluloid: the impossible reds of The Red Shoes, the hallucinatory colors of Black Narcissus, the pure visual intoxication of Powell and Pressburger's cinema. Then, in 1975, the last lab closed. The cameras were scrapped. We replaced perfection with convenience—and we've been chasing that magic ever since. This is the story of how cinema lost its most beautiful look.

When Kurosawa shot Seven Samurai, he framed every battle, every desperate face, every rain-soaked sword within a nearly square frame. When David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia, he stretched the desert across a frame nearly three times wider than it was tall. These weren't technical decisions. They were artistic ones. The shape of the frame determines what you see, what fits in the composition, what the film can mean. This is your guide to understanding the formats and ratios that define cinema—and why they matter more than you think.

Japanese silent movies were never silent. From the first showing of motion pictures in Japan in 1896 until the end of the silent era in 1939, a voice—or multiple voices—always filled the theater. The benshi, Japan's silent film narrators, didn't just explain what was happening on screen. They transformed flickering images into living art, their voices breathing life into every frame. They were performers, interpreters, and stars. And for over four decades, they were the main attraction.

While other countries briefly experimented with live film narrators, only in Japan did they become an influential and integral part of cinema itself. This is their story.