Start Over

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

Page scan 000131 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 #:
000131
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

118 imagination's manipulation of film technique. Another extreme example of the Impressionists! emphasis on the transforming powers of camera placement may be seen in the occasional recognition of the aesthetic importance of optically subjective camera angles, which indicates a character's optical perspective on some event. Like camera distance, this aesthetic resource was never explored systematically by Impressionist theory. The most explicit suggestions come from Pierre Porte. Unlike the theatre, he argues, cinema can put us in the characters' places; the camera can be a character's eyes. Since cinema should strive for aioe from other arts, the film-maker should show us the action not as a theatre spectator might view it but as the characters see it. "Un homme tombe dans un precipice. Pourquoi ne tomberions nous pas nous-mémes?"76 Porte distinguishes between visual representation of. a character's experience and visual presentation of it. For example, in one film, 'a’dying woman's vision is conveyed by gauzing over a long-shot showing her and her son. "Mais ce flou n'est: qu'une expression, ce n'est pas une sensation."/7 Ideally; says Porte, the film-maker should make the gauze gradually cover a shot of the son taken from the optical point-of-view of the mother. In effect.