Film theory, an academic discipline emerging in the 1920s, provides conceptual frameworks for understanding cinema's complex relationship with reality, other arts, individual viewers, and society. Distinct from film criticism or history, its roots trace back to philosophers like Henri Bergson, whose 1896 work anticipated new ways of thinking about movement, and Ricciotto Canudo, who famously proclaimed cinema "the Seventh Art."
Early silent era theorists, including Vachel Lindsay, explored film's unique "camera-born opportunities" and visual symbolism, while Hugo Münsterberg drew parallels between cinematic techniques like the close-up and mental processes such as attention and memory. In France, figures like Louis Delluc (1919) and Jean Epstein championed photogénie, the unique power and expressive quality of cinema, particularly emphasizing the significance of the close-up. Concurrently, Russian pioneers such as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Lev Kuleshov developed groundbreaking montage theory, asserting that editing formed the very essence of cinematography.