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

Page scan 000222 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 #:
000222
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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209 film. I shall conelude with a comparison of French Impressionist style with other avant-garde styles of the time. Both La Roue and Ballet Mécanique share a common graphic element: machines in motion. Yet the. ImpresSionist paradigm permits us to distinguish their respective styles. First, both films make extensive use of close-ups, but 'in La Roue these close-ups frequently symbolize forces at work in the drama (e.g., the close-ups of wheels and circular signals as symbolic of "the wheel" of the title); in Ballet Mécanique, the close-ups have purely graprte functions.” In La Roue, there are many optically subjective camera angles and close-ups, whereas nothing in Ballet Mécanique can be contextually defined as subjective. Both ia Roue and Ballet Mécanique contain moving camera shots which follow a moving subject, but only the former contains Shots in which the camera moves independently of a subject (e.g., the tavern scene) and shots in which the camera's movement presents a subjective point-of-view (e.g., Sisif's wanderings after his blinding). La Roue furthermore contains a much wider range of single-light-source and shadowlighting effects (e.g., the train wreck, the tavern scene, the snowstorm) than Ballet Mécanique, but the latter exploits' to a far greater degree abstract and semi-abstract patterns of line, shape, and movement; indeed, the entire