French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (December 1974)

Record Details:

Title:
French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style
Date:
December 1974
Publisher:
University of Iowa
Volume:
French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (Dissertation, 1974)
Leaf #:
0005
Language:
English
Collection:
Global Cinema
Format:
dissertations
Contributor:
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Doctoral dissertation entitled, "French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style," by film scholar David Bordwell. Submitted to the University of Iowa in 1974. Document is scanned from the David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson papers, archived at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Date Added:
May 23, 2024
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

DO nature of cinema. Derived from an idealist aesthetic of art as expression, Impressionist film theory stresses the film artist's transformation of nature through photogénie, which consists of the aesthetic functions of camerawork, optical devices, and editing. Impressionist theory locates the essence of cinema in Visual devices which express emotional and mental states of either the film-maker or the characters within the film. The style of Impressionist film-making is accordingly characterized by visual devices which indicate Subjective states. Close analysis of thirty-six ImpresSionist films by Gance, Delluc, Dulac, L'Herbier, Epstein, Kirsanoff, and others shows the prominence of subjective camerawork and optical devices, as well as rhythmic editing to convey the psychological tempo of a character's experience. [In contrast, other French cinema of the time lacks such a style. By means of a model based on Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblances," the thesis constructs a paradigm of Impressionist style which permits comparison of Impressionism not only with contemporary non-Impressionist French cinema but also with German and Soviet styles of the time. As a historical phenomenon, Impressionist is seen to be a complex, multilayered movement in which the