Pictorialist naturalism and la terre

Between 1902 and 1925 a form of realist cinema appeared in France that took the urban working class and rural peasantry as its principal subject matter. To some extent this cinema can be associated with a general trend then developing in some European countries of the production of "artistic" or intellectually sophisticated films for minority bourgeois audiences as part of a commercial strategy to counter the growing hegemony of Hollywood. This effort at the bourgeoisification of the film audience led to the appearance of a number of such films, particularly over the 1907-14 period, including L'assassinat du Duc de Guise (France, Charles Le Bargy/Albert Lambert, 1908), Quo Vadis (Italy, Enrico Guazzoni, 1913), Der Student von Prag (Germany, Stellan Rye, 1913), and Ingeborg Holm (Sweden, Victor Sjöström, 1913). After 1918, and against the context of an even more aggressive expansion by Hollywood into the European film market, these attempts were consolidated, particularly so in Germany and France, with the appearance of expressionist films such as Das cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920) and realist films such as Ramuntcho (Jacques de Baroncelli, 1919).