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

Page scan 000202 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 #:
000202
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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189 the subsequent dramatic action. Such an editing pattern, while fairly rare in Impressionist films (occuring in only five films), occurs in no non-Impressionist film examined. Far more central to the editing of spatial relations in Impressionist films is a specific pattern of cutting within a spatial whole which follows a character's act of looking at something. The typical sequence is this: 1. Shot of character looking offscreen. 2. Shot of object or person looked: at, seen Drom character's point-of-view. 3. Shot, as 1 of character reacting. Film students will recognize this as similar to the famous "Kuleshov effect," so-called because of the Russian filmmaker's experiments with "creative geography" (although accounts do not specify if shot 2 was a point-of-view Shot. in his tests). Thais editing pattern is important for French Impressionism in several respects. First, the pattern is pervasive; no fewer than thirty-two out of thirtyfive Impressionist films contain instances of it. Second, the pattern is very distinctive; out of the fifteen nonImpressionist films examined, only three contain instances of it. Third, the pattern includes another characteristic element of Impressionist film style: the optically subjec tive point-of-view shot.. Finally, as in the case of flash back and fantasy editing