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

Page scan 000153 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 #:
000153
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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140 definition, there is apparently no single stylistic ifeature | which, taken alone, constitutes a necessary and sufficient condition for including a film in what trained observers would agree to be the class of Impressionist films. For example, rhythmic editing in a film of the period would be an indication that the film might belong to the Impres— sionist class. But such a trait is not a sufficient condition because there are films (e.g., Symphonie Diagonale, Ballet Mécanique) which use rhythmic editing but which virtually all scholars would not call Impressionist. Nor is rhythmic editing a necessary condition, since experts would include certain films (e.g., Rose-France, La Femme de Nulle Part) in the class of Impressionist works despite their lack of rhythmic editing. The model I have chosen instead is that of socalled "family resemblances." At the conclusion of Wittgenstein's famous analysis of the concept of "rame," he | characterizes the nature of the similarities he has discovered not as common traits but rather as "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail." Wittgenstein's family-resemblance concept can help us understand how trained observers have perceived features of films as coalescing into a significant stylistic