But even now, the dominance of mainstream Hollywood entertainment wasn’t as strong as it would be, and alternatives were still widely seen and influential.
In 1915, after a ban was ended on foreign imports in France the early Hollywood fare inspired the birth of the cinematic avant-garde. A group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing. The trend became known as French Impressionist Cinema. The most thrilling sequence in silent era film: Safety Last! of 1923 with Harold Lloyd
Germany was America’s strongest competitor. Its most distinctive contribution was the dark, hallucinatory worlds of German Expressionism, which advanced the power of anti-realistic presentation to put internal states of mind onscreen, as well as strongly influenced the emerging horror genre.
The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called dialectical or intellectual montage, which strove to make non-linear, often violently clashing, images express ideas and provoke emotional and intellectual reactions in the viewer.