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

Page scan 000161 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 #:
000161
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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148 thematically, Impressionist films often center on the importance of memory. This theme "motivates" stylistic devices like the flashback, the fantasy-image, and subjective optical effects. In the course of outlining the paradigm I shall indicate recurrent contextual functions of miy 1 tetie devices, and where useful I shall suggest some thematic aspects of such functions. Another factor which is related to style deserves consideration: narrative. As Chapter I has pointed out, both contemporary critics and Subsequent historians have distinguished between the abstract cinema on one hand and the Impressionist cinema on the other. This distinetion rests widebody upon that between narrative films and non-narrative films. Impressionist films tell stories about characters; abstract films (e.g., Symphonie Diagonale, Ballet Méchanique) tell no story but instead juxtapose Shapes, movements, and gestures in a "pure" rhythm. Within a certain range, narrative provides a useful internal criterion, and many of the specific differences between Impressionist style and abstract-film style are related to the general narrative/non-narrative distinction. But narrative aS a category will not help us distinguish Impressionist films from other films which are not abstract. Narrative, then, constitutes a Significant but not