Which country makes the most feature films? Not the United States. India regularly releases well over a thousand a year, and a 2009 UNESCO survey ranked Nigeria second by number of films. Hollywood dominates global box office, but cinema has many centers, each with its own ideas about what film is for. This level visits five of them.

Soviet montage

After the 1917 revolution, Soviet filmmakers short of raw film stock studied editing intensely. Lev Kuleshov is said to have cut the same blank close-up of an actor next to a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin and a woman on a couch; viewers praised the actor's subtle hunger, grief and desire. The Kuleshov effect is the finding that viewers read a shot's meaning from the shots placed beside it. The original footage is lost and modern repeats of the test give mixed results, but the idea shaped film theory.

Sergei Eisenstein went further. Soviet montage theory held that meaning comes from the collision of shots, so editing creates ideas that no single shot contains. Where Hollywood hid its cuts, Eisenstein wanted the viewer to feel them. His Battleship Potemkin (1925), made for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, became a model studied in film schools worldwide.

Italian neorealism

Italy came out of the Second World War with its studios damaged and its people poor. A group of directors turned that poverty into a style. Italian neorealism filmed ordinary people's lives on real streets, often with nonprofessional actors. Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) was shot in a city just freed from German occupation. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) follows a poor man whose bicycle, which he needs for a job pasting up posters, is stolen; he and his young son search Rome for it. The lead was played by a factory worker. The French critic André Bazin admired such films for respecting the ambiguity of real life, preferring long takes and deep focus to editing that tells the viewer what to think.

Japan

Japan had a large, busy film industry from the silent era on, but most Western viewers knew little of it until Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Rashomon tells one crime through several conflicting accounts, none confirmed as the truth. The phrase "Rashomon effect" is now used for witnesses who sincerely disagree. Yasujiro Ozu took another path, filming quiet family dramas such as Tokyo Story (1953) with a still camera placed low, near the height of a person kneeling on a mat.

India

India's first full-length feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), was made by Dadasaheb Phalke. Today Indian cinema is many industries in many languages: Hindi films from Mumbai (often called Bollywood), along with major Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali and Kannada industries. Popular Indian films often blend romance, drama, comedy and action, with song-and-dance sequences, a mix sometimes called masala after a blend of spices. Satyajit Ray's Bengali film Pather Panchali (1955) offered a quieter realism, and Ray said that seeing Bicycle Thieves helped convince him to make films. In 2023 the song "Naatu Naatu" from the Telugu film RRR won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Nigeria

Nigeria's industry grew without big studios or state funding. Nollywood grew from cheap films sold directly on video, with Living in Bondage (1992) often named as its starting point. Producers shot quickly on small budgets in English, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, and sold tapes and later discs in markets across Africa and the diaspora. Critics complained about rushed production; fans answered that the films told African stories, in African settings, for African audiences, at a price they could pay. Streaming deals now bring Nollywood to wider audiences.

Worked example: the Odessa Steps and a stolen bicycle

Set two famous scenes side by side. In Battleship Potemkin, Tsarist soldiers march down a broad flight of steps in Odessa, firing on a crowd. Eisenstein cuts between the soldiers' boots, moving in rigid rhythm, and the scattering crowd: a mother carrying her wounded son, a woman whose glasses shatter, a baby carriage bouncing down the steps. The sequence takes longer on screen than such an event would in life, because the editing stretches time. The clash between machine-like order and human panic is the argument. No massacre happened on those steps in quite that way, but the scene made audiences feel the cruelty of the old regime.

At the end of Bicycle Thieves, the desperate father tries to steal a bicycle himself and is caught in front of his son. The camera mostly stays back and lets the shame play out; the boy quietly takes his father's hand. There is no villain and no lesson stated aloud.

Both scenes claim to show something true, and both are constructed. Eisenstein builds truth through the cut; the neorealists hoped to find it by trusting real places and faces. Each style also answered its politics: Potemkin celebrated a revolution for a new state, while neorealism rejected the polished studio films of the Fascist years.