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

Page scan 000107 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 #:
000107
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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94 turn and shall conclude with a general evaluation of the theory. The Nature of Art Although the Impressionists' ties to traditional aesthetics are rarely avowed, a clear aesthetic underlies their position. Broadly speaking, Impressionist film theory holds that art is expression. Like Romantic theories, the Impressionists assume that art resides in the transformation of nature by the imagination and that art yields not discursive truth but an experiential truth anchored in feelings. This concept of art as expression is extended to apply to the cinema. Several remarks scattered throughout Impressionist writing suggests that art is seen as the imaginative transpotnatiéh of nature. "Certainement, le cinéma part de la nature, comme tous les arts," writes Delluc. "Et comme tous les arts il doit interpréter la nature et la styliser et la recréer sous un angle visuel nouveau."1! Jean Epstein's writing on literary aesthetics testifies to a similar insistence on art as deviation from reality.° Canudo states the same assumption more clearly: "La peinture ne réproduit pas la nature, mais elle la compose avec un parti-pris."4 Similarly, Marcel Défosse defines art as