4 ideas
Mainstream Hollywood built a style in which continuity editing, the 180-degree rule, eyeline matches and shot/reverse-shot seal the fictional world so viewers forget the camera and the cut. It is 'romantic' because the stories centre on individuals whose desires drive the plot and are usually fulfilled. Once you name this style as one choice among many, other cinemas stop looking like failed attempts at it and become deliberate alternatives.
Instead of tracing an art form through its biggest hits, stars or studios, trace it through the moments someone changed how the basic unit (the shot) is made: its framing, movement, lighting, duration or cut. The history then becomes a chain of innovators and the imitators who turned their breakthroughs into convention. Commercially marginal works move to the centre and popular successes are judged by what they added, not what they earned.
He also routinely cut across the 180-degree axis that Hollywood treated as inviolable, filming conversations from positions all around the characters to build a 360-degree space. Viewers were not disoriented. This shows that a supposedly universal grammatical rule of film was a local convention, and that a rigorous alternative system could carry equal emotional force.
Hollywood's global dominance reflects its distribution power and capital, not a monopoly on artistic invention. Decisive advances in how films are shot and told came from Japan, India, Iran, Senegal and elsewhere, for example Ousmane Sembène's African-language cinema and Abbas Kiarostami's blurring of documentary and fiction. A history centred on America therefore misreports where the art form actually advanced.