For over a century, scholars have struggled to account for film’s influence on literary form. What, exactly, are the qualities that make writing “cinematic”? Some have pointed to the fragmentation of syntax, the privileging of action and dialogue over interiority, and the use of flashbacks and cross-cutting to scramble linear narration. Others have questioned the validity of this method entirely, suggesting that analogies between film and literary form elide essential differences in the ways these media structure our experience of text, image, and sound. Film Forms intervenes in this debate in two key ways. First, I argue that Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s writings on montage have served as a longstanding basis for theories of cinematic literature, continuing to shape how U.S. writers understand the movement of techniques between media and the relationship between form and politics into our own time. Second, I uncover a corpus of texts that train readers to interpret their forms through the lens of film by incorporating intertitles, embedded screenplays, notes for cinematography and editing (e.g., “close-up,” “fade out”), and montage sequences. Reading humorous poems and comic strips in early motion picture fan magazines alongside contemporary experimental novels, I reveal how U.S. writers have used film forms to imagine new modes of reading shaped by the structures of spectatorship. I begin, in Chapter 1, with a new genealogy of montage as a concept, illustrating how the circulation of Eisenstein’s films and theoretical writings through U.S. literary culture stimulated debate about the political effects of mass protagonists, juxtaposition, and contrapuntal sound. In the chapters that follow, I track the evolution of four film forms from the early twentieth century to the contemporary moment, highlighting how their effects shift as they intersect with the discourse around Soviet montage. Chapter 2 examines the literary intertitle. Beginning in 1900, silent films trained spectators to toggle between scanning images and reading text, and a decade later, U.S. writers began translating this alternation effect into literature. By the mid-1920s, writers like Zelda Fitzgerald, Robert M. Coates, and Michael Gold were incorporating intertitles into their prose to foreground how our perceptions have been colonized by the tropes of Hollywood cinema, and to break the illusory continuity of capitalist image-making. In Chapter 3, I explore the movement of screenplay formatting into literature. Whereas O. Henry, in 1904, framed his embedded scenario as a vaudeville attraction that could stimulate interpretation by resisting closure, Nathan Asch, in 1930, used the screenplay to probe the role of the novel in promoting solipsism, shifting from stream of consciousness into a decentered, national perspective modeled on Soviet cinema. More recently, writers like Karen Tei Yamashita and Justin Torres have used the embedded screenplay to highlight film’s ambivalent role in recording minoritarian histories. In Chapter 4, I turn to the film poem, demonstrating how writers from Parker Tyler to Harryette Mullen have used notes for cinematography, editing, and sound to turn speakers into voiceovers and readers into projectors. Chapter 5 traces the emergence of the montage sequence as a literary form through the work of Langston Hughes and John Rechy. Tracking Hughes’s use of montage from his unpublished screenplay drafts through Montage of a Dream Deferred, I argue that the practice of screenwriting enabled Hughes to recognize montage as the form proper to representing the long arc of African American culture, one that made meaning out of interruption and dissent.