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

Page scan 00020 from French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style

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 #:
00020
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
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with the work of the two most important French historians — of cinema: Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry. Sadoul's analysis!9 of the movement marks an advance in several respects: he names it "Impressionism," Suggests some points of stylistic homogeneity, distinguishes Impressionism from abstract cinema, and proposes a period for the movement (roughly 1920 to 1924). For our purposes, the shortcomings of Sadoul's work are nevertheless apparent. Although he posits a unified movement, the individual biographies he presents never demonstrate a common unity. Moreover, Sadoul is vague and cursory in discussion of both the styre' or’ individual! fi line’ ana the theory of the movement as a whole. Such vagueness about the films and the theory makes Sadoul's periodization suspect, since he relies whoily’on external’ (i.e., non-stylistic and non-theoretical) criteria: he dates the beginning of the movement from Pathé's financial failure after the war and marks the end of the movement with the death of Delluc. Examination of the films, however, would have shown that at one level the movement did not grind to a sudden Stop in 1924. Finally, Sadoul's account is totally undocumented. In sum, Sadoul's work does not satisfactorily answer the questions posed at the wb set tat Paya stirdy ?