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

Page scan 000139 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 #:
000139
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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Impressionist theorizing is the lack of an explicit account of the experience of film and of experience in general. Without an epistemology or a psychology, Impressionist theory's account of photogénie cannot adequately explain > how the film image reveals and transforms reality. An epistemology drawn from Bergson or a psychology along Gestalt lines might start to ground Impressionist film theory, but the choice between these positions is hardly an indifferent one, and the eoncepts of revelation and transformation would then demand much more analysis than the Impressionists ever give euve: In short, as Impressionist theory stands, it is unfinished, only a rough sketch of a complete theory. | Besides such cracks in its theoretical anatomy, the Impressionist position suffers from at least two purely logical defects. There is, first, the move from an account of cinema's basic nature to normative recommendations about film style. The problem of how to justify a shift from descriptive to prescriptive propositions--how to get from "is" to "ought"--is a classic one in logic, aesthetics, and ethics; how to solve it remains a theoretical difficulty. A second problem lies in the nature of the normative argument from the alleged "purity of the medium." In film, the problems of scope attending such purism have