- Action. Instruction to the performers to carry out the action of a scene being filmed.
- Actor. Man who plays a character in a film.
- Actress. Woman who plays a character in a film.
- Auteurism. A critical theory, popular in France in the 1950s and 60s, that ascribed overall responsibility for the creation of a film to its director and thereby provoked renewed critical analysis of much previously neglected Hollywood work. The "politique des auteurs" (auteur policy) was first stated by Francois Truffaut in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers du Cinema; the main exponent of the auteur "theory" in America was the critic Andrew Sarris.
- Back lighting. Lighting directed at the camera from behind subject, which is therefore silhouetted.
- Back projection. Background scene projected onto a screen behind the action so that they seem to be on location. A convention of classic Hollywood cinema that can now look somewhat dated, it became a source of great critical debate on Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), where its perceptical use was both attacked for technical sloppiness and defended as expressively meaningful.
- Bio-pic. A biographical film of a famous personality particularly popularised by Warner Brothers in the 1930s. e.g. The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937).
- Camera angle. Looking up, looking down, tilted (the latter used particularly effectively in The Third Man to suggest a word out of joint)
- Chiaroscuro. A notable use of light and shade.
- Cinema verite. Literally meaning "cinema truth";it signified a kind of documentary cinema that used light-weight equipment, minimal crews (cameras and sound) and interview techniques.
- Crane shot. A shot where the camera is mounted on a crane and rises above the ground to offer an aerial perspective. A famous example is the shot in High Noon where the crane shot of the Marshal in the empty street prior to his confrontation with the four gunman emphasises his isolation, rejection and vulnerability.
- Cut. Change from one shot to another.
- Cross cutting. Cutting back, giving the impression of parallel action and the two events happening simultaneously. Famous examples include the finale of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), where the chase to save the pardoned hero from execution in the modern story is cross cut with Christ's procession to Calgary; and the scene in The Godfather (1972), where the baptism of Michael Corleone's godson is cross cut with the violent elimination of Corleone's underworld rivals.
- Jump cut. An ellipsis, sometimes surprising as when in the film Don't Look Now (1773), the director Nicoas Roeg cuts from the wife's scream on seeing her dead daughter to the drill her husband is using in his work on the church in Venice - a sound match and cut that, as Roeg said, fires the viewer like a bullet into the future.
- Match cut.Two shots kinked by some aural or visual connection, like the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where a bone tossed in the air by a primordial ape is visually displaced by a shot of a spinning spacecraft.
- Day for night. A technique used for shooting night sequences during daytime with the use of special lens filters. Alluded to in Francois Truffaut's film about film-making, La Nuit Americaine - Day for Night (1973).
- Deep focus. A technique favoured by realists in which objects very near the camera as well as those far away are in focus at the same time, particularly associated with cameraman Gregg Toland and the 1940s films of Welles and Wyler.
- Dissolve. A visible transition where one scene fades out as another fades in.
- Documentary. A term first coined by John Grierson when describing Robert Flaherty's film about the daily life of a Polynesian youth, Moana (1926). It derived from documentative, which the French used to describe travelogues, but it has come to be applied to all non-fiction films, albeit covering a wide variety of styles.
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- Film noir. Are films with a grim, urban setting that deal mainly with dark and violent passions in a downbeat way. Especially associated with American thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s.
- Free cinema. A documentary movement in England in the 1950s that was a springboard for the careers in film of directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.
- Genre. A type or class of film (e.g. the musical, the western, etc.).
- German expressionism. A style of film common in Germany in the 1920s, typified by the dramatic lighting, distorted sets, symbolic action and characterisation as in, for example, The Cabinet od Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920).
- Mise en scene. It literally means "staging" - the way in which the elements and components in the film are arranged and encompassed by the camera, or the term usually used to denote that part of the cinematic process that takes place on the set, as opposed to montage, which takes place afterwards.
- Montage. Is the juxtaposition of material (successive shots, or items within a shot) to suggest meaning - as when Eisenstein in Potemkin evokes anger at the massacre by showing three successive shots of stone lions in various positions, shot to look as though they are one lion rising to its feet and roaring in fury.
- Move brats. The younger generation of Hollywood directors who exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s; e.g. Spielderg, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, Michael Scorsese.
- Narrative. The structured series of events, linked by cause and effect, that provide the film's plots.
- Narration. The various means by which the events of the plot can be placed before the viewer. Also used of voice-over narration, a technique particularly associatedwith the fatalism of the film noir, like that of the mortally wounded hero in Double Indemnity (1944) or that of the dead man in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
- Neo-realism. Is connected with movement out of the studio, shooting on real locations, sometimes the absence of a script and/or non-professional casts - all designed simultaneously to cut costs and increase the impression of spontaneity. In fact inaugurated by Renoir, but associated with Italian post-war directors (Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica).
- New wave. A loose, heterogeneous group of young French critics (Chabrol, Rivette, Truffaut. Godard), who went into direction in the late 1950s and 1960s. Much influenced by Hollywood action cinema, they relied heavily on hand-held cameras, a laconic and non-moralistic style, a general senseof existential amoralism.
- Pan. The camera looks around from a stationary position. Can be used for dramatic effect as in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) when a panning shot reveals the presence of Indians just as the stagecoach seems to be heading to safety.
- Point of view shot. Is a shot where the action is seen through the eyes of a particular character, the shot generally preceded or followed by a shot of the character looking. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) structures its whole action around this principle and Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake (1948) also experimented with a subjective camera by showing us only what the leading character himself saw and only showing the character himself in the mirror.
- Screwball comedy. Type of comedy popular in the 1930s Hollywood chacterised by frantic action, verbal wit and a couple in a bizarre predicament, e.g. Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Hawke's Bringing Up Baby (1938).
- Shot. Single piece of film without cuts: long shot, medium shot, close shot or close up.
- Tracking shot. Is where the camera moves about in order to follow subject, a technique taken to its extreme in the continuous opening shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) or Robert Altman's The Player (1992) and in Hitchcock's use of ten minutes takes in Rope (1948)
- Zoom shot. A shot during which the focal length of the lens is adjusted and gives the impression of optical motion without moving the camera backwards or forwards. The zoom lens is a particularly favoured piece of apparatus of the directors such as Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick.
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