The IMR and The 'Primitive Style'

The IMR
The key code is the international language of film or the Institutional Mode of Representation. In film theory, the IMR is the dominant mode of film construction, which developed in the years after the turn of the century, becoming the norm by about 1914. The IMR is characterised by the attempt to create an entirely closed fictional world on screen. The audience is completely imaginatively involved in the film, instead of being distant from it and seeing it as an object to be examined.

The 'Primitive Style'
The 'Primitive Style' of movie-making predated classical Hollywood's continuity system (or IMR). 
Techniques include frontal staging or a tableau style, exaggerated gestures, hardly any camera movement and no Point-of-view shots.