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

Page scan 000105 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 #:
000105
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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CHAPTER III. IMPRESSIONIST FILM THEORY Just as the period 1913-1925 saw a change in French intellectuals' and artists' attitude toward film, so did roughly the same years see the rise of a new theoretical perspective on the cinema. It is important that this perspective was generated, promulgated, and shared by virtually the same people who initiated and sustained a coherent film culture and who made a stylistically homogeneous set of films; that is, a distinct theory of film is an aspect of what I am designating as the ImpresSionist movement. Impressionist theory is not the specialist's ideal of theory-building. Nowhere can one find a sustained, rigorously mounted theoretical argument. Most ImpresSionist theory exists in two forms: scattered unsupported pronouncements on film aesthetics and implicit assumptions underlying: critical, historical, or polemical writings. Worse, the Impressionist writers betray little acquaintance with systematic philosophizing. Like many avant-garde move-_ ments, Impressionism had specific polemical and Artie. ยข goals, and these goals often tempted the writers +0 Sub stitute arp akne for earned positions. The result is a rough-and-ready assemblage of unacknowledged assumptions, casual opinions, and fragmentary aesthetic claims.