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

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 #:
000159
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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146 character looking at something and shots of what that character sees traces the flow of the character's optical attention. And rhythmic editing permits the film-maker to indicate the tempo of a character's experience. In all, the style characteristically suggests the flow of a character's consciousness and thus transcends objective mechanical recording of appearances. "Impressionism," then, is not a misnomer: the style renders the film-maker's or a character's impression of a situation. As the Impressionist painters seek in their medium stylistic equivalents for a perceiver's fleeting optical sensations, so Impressionist film-makers--given a medium that involves both time and space--use cinema to suggest the flux of optical and psychological experience. True to ImpresSionist theory, nature is always seen transformed by human consciousness. The film style thus offers a set of devices which, established both contextually and conventionally, suggest the inner life behind overt appearances. It should be added that subject matter--what a given film is concretely "“about"--and theme--those concepts or ideas that are imbedded in a given film--will not be explicitly dealt with in this study. First, subject and theme are not intrinsic parts of style as here defined. Second, the historical impact of Impressionist cinema