The history of art has traditionally been conceived of as a history of style interacting with genre, or of patronage and markets, display practices, and critical reception, but only relatively rarely has the history of art been organized according to medium. Since films have seldom been made primarily for the sake of exploring style, and their critical reception has in large part been the stuff of ephemeral journalism, their history has often been considered to lie outside the bounds of the history of art. The gulf between fine artand cinema can seem immense. While Picasso was devising what came to be called Cubism, an art radically stripped of affect, early cineasts were Romantically gripped by pantomimes of love in dire circumstances (e.g., Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii, 1913), and while Pollock was daringly beginning to drip paint, Mr. Blandings, the adman, was building himself a house in rural Connecticut (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, 1948) and learning that country folk sometimes did things differently.

Early cinema comprised not only folk art that purveyed sophistication but also a modern, mechanized art that often portrayed pathetic poverty. In either of these guises, film may have been supposed to have had as little to do with high modernism as did art deco movie palaces.