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 #:
00029
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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16 different attitudes marked them as being in separate camps. | In a similar but less antagonistic way, several contemporary writers distinguished the Impressionist avant-garde from the abstract-film avant-garde. ‘Pierre Porte called the abstract film "pure cinema" and defined it as an elimination of plot and character in order to express purified plastic movement. © Dulac, Gance, Clair and Tedesco all took such a definition for granted and implicitly contrasted abstract cinema with Impressionist films, which did contain plots and characters.¢/ Jean Epstein explicitly rejected abstract film ("Si ce, cinéma abstrait enchante quelques-uns, qu'ils achétent un kaléidoscop"), thereby assuming the split Porte and others had pointed out.°? Perhaps André Delons summarized the difference best. Impressionists, he wrote, always reSpected the realistic aspects of the image: "S'tils transposent souvent, c'est toujours pour signifier, et rendre matérielle une impression (on a parlé d''impressionisme' ) en accord direct avec le cours méme du film que la seule vie véelle inspire." The abstract cinema, on the other hand, moves away from reality toward pure visual expression. 26 Such contemporary testimony points to a realization that the stylistic differences in the films reflected distinct, though not usually hostile, film