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

Page scan 000111 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 #:
000111
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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98 more fundamental question enters: How can the artist's "expression" be known as such by a perceiver? That is, is not a private account of feeling driven either to mysticism or to solipsism? On the other hand, Impressionist claims about "expressiveness" suggest some sense in which the term "feeling" is ascribable to objects themselves. 16 What is this sense? And in what way can this feeling be justified as "truth"? Obviously, such questions as these are ingredient to a philosophical aesthetic, but Impressionism ignores them. It picks up from Symbolist doctrine what it needs to secure a general and unexamined premise concerning the nature of art, which may be formulated in this way: Art is the transformation of nature by the human imagination, evoking or suggesting feelings and presenting "truth" to such feelings. The Relation of Film to Traditional Arts Impressionist film theory assumes at the outset that film is a distinct art possessing creative possibilities which no other art possesses. Like so many other theoretical assumptions of the movement , this view emerges from a polemical context. Before 1920, several writers denied the cinema's artistic status on various grounds: