Pure cinema is situated in terms of a larger aesthetic narrative that involves visual artists, theorists, intellectuals, and avant-garde filmmakers such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, and Sergei Eisenstein. Hitchcock appears in this milieu in his relation to a German experimental cinema tradition, and most obviously in his work with F. W. Murnau at UFA studios from 1924 to 1925. The chapter traces pure cinema as an evolution of a silent cinematic ethos that championed pure form: shape, pattern, line, symmetry, and the freedom of expression of movement and time within a moving image medium.