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 #:
000181
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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168 This insistence on examining the behavior of light an ware): ious situations is one strong characteristic of Impressionism and as such partially justifies our gacr rire the name "Impressionism" to the movement. Of the non-Impressionist films examined, only L'Enfant de Paris, with its alternating dark and light scenes, he’ Coupable, with its black backgrounds, stark sidelighting, and use of a sliding Shadow to suggest a stage curtain, and Dulac's abstract films (e.g., Disque 927, Themes et Variations) approach the range of lighting effects present in Impressionist film style. Decor. Due to the extreme diversity of the subjects of Impressionist, films, it.is difficult to.argue..that. specific settings recur. From the medieval settings of Le Diable dans la Ville to the twenty-first century surroundings of L'Inhumaine, Impressionist cinema develops little in the way of a fixed iconography. Impressionists’ ends were mainly stylistic, and these ends were sought in and through a great variety of locales and furnishings. As individuals, the film-makers tended to cultivate idosyncratic settings: in L'Herbier, an Expressionistic distortion of upper class milieux; in Delluc, a sober drabness in the rendering of the countryside; in Epstein, a concern with the chang ing moods of rivers and seas. Like narrative, decor