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

Page scan 000137 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 #:
000137
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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form should ideally owe nothing to literary or dramatic form, what does cinematic form consist of? This is perhaps the greatest problem in Impressionist film theory. Needing a model of temporal structure, refusing the model offaved by narrative forms, and unable or unwilling to generate a theory of uniquely cinematic structure, the ImpresSionist theorist looks to music for analogues for filmic construction. Interestingly, musical forms generated by motivic play (e.g., sonata form) are not seen as the prime models, 88 What is borrowed from music is the concept of rhythm. Impressionist theory rests its idea of filmic construction almost wholly upon the rhythmic relationships between images. Unanimous in praising rhythm in cinema, Impressionist writers never consider the concept closely. Gance announces, unhelpfully, that rhythm makes cinema the music) of light .89 Moussinac proposes that rhythm is a need of the mind: we live ina bowsy and psychic rhythm. 909 Most precise of any is René Clair, who notes that three factors control cinematic rhythm--the duration of each image, the organization of shots in editing, and movement within each image--but he goes no further.?! It is not at all clear, then, how rhythmic relations between images can adequately define cinematic structure. In