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

104 remplacer. On abus du sous-titre....Le tort est de nous interrompre dans notre é6motion uniquement visuelle."353 Canudo agrees that the cinema was een to be not a text but "un conte visuel fait avec des images. "34 Another assumed theatrical material consists of Stylized acting and setting; the stage actor must exaggerate expansively, and stage decor is inevitably a fabrication; theatre is conventionalized, coded. Cinema, on the other hand, stands opposed to such conventions. Cinema acting, notes Germaine Dulac, can be much more intimate and discreet than a theatre performance. 2° Delluc claims that French film actors, transplanted from the stage, exaggerate in a theatrical style, whereas American film actors wave a *Raturalt spontaneity. 56 For Canudo, "l'acteur du Septiéme Art exprime une image humaine. "51 Similarly, cinema's capacity for using natural or naturalistic surroundings as decor should allow film to avoid the false decor of the theatre. Apain, the American cinema typifies this: "Le premier chevauchée | d'un cowboy dans le Far-West fit @éclater les portants de carton-paté."38 There are several problems here--e.g., equating theatre as a medium with specific styles and historically variable conventions, shifting from a notion of what cinema essentially is to a notion of what it can