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

Page scan 000177 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 #:
000177
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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164 illuminates the smoke-wreathed dancers and leaves the back-. ground totally dark. In La Dixiéme Symphonie, several Scenes are played in side-lighting, most notably that which occurs when, during a private concert, a seducer turns out the room light, plunging him and the composer's wife into a darkness lit only from the side; she turns and is swallowed up in darkness by walking behind a black curtain. Le Diable dans ia Ville furnishes ‘a’ simitar-instance: when one young woman opens the door to admit another woman, there is a shot of the second woman in a totally dark frame, with only the candle and her sidelit face visible. Perhaps most striking, however, is the way Sidelighting (corbined with careful deployment of figures and objects) creates a visual metaphor on one shot of Les Aventures de Robert Macaire. A young woman is brushing her hair on screen left, while on screen right coils of a soft fibre are hanging down from a spinning wheel. The hair is compared to the fibre by the side-light, which highlights both identically. The various positions of the lighting source, then, tend to create atmosphere and to underline important dramatic actions. Another lighting phenomenon which is extensively used in Impressionist films is that of shadows. Sometimes, they function in a broadly atmospheric way: e.g., the simi lar shadows slanting across the ceiling in Feu Mathias