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 #:
000226
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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rea ie by the accelerating pace of the dance itself and by an occasional tracking shot, but not by any rhythmic editing; the spatial unity of the sequence is dominant. In Kean, the hero executes a drunken dance in a tavern, which is presented entirely in rhythmically accelerated editing: quick panning shots of Kean are intercut with quick panning shots around the other dancers; there are fragmentary close-ups of dancers' feet, clapping hands, Kean's face, and bottles emhAdne on a shelf. As the pace of the dance builds, the shots get shorter and shorter until the dancers. collapse from exhaustion. The use of rhythmic editing to present a scene as the characters experience it, entirely absent from Nana, occurs elsewhere in Kean (notably in the scene of his drunken visions). On the whole, then, the Style paradigm reveals that although Nana does contain some features of Impressionist style, they are very few in number and not particularly strong in quality, and the absence of certain highly characteristic features (optically Subjective moving-camera shots, elaborate optical effects, glance/object editing, and rhythmic editing) suggests that Nana is not properly classified as an Impressionist film--a judgement which most commentators on Nana have implicitly assumed.’ Kean, on the other hand, belongs firmly to the Impressionist style.