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 #:
000233
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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£20 while Langlois' "L'Avant-Garde Francaise"! draws on very little data to support his conelusions. This chapter will attempt to put the cultural, theoretical, and stylistic data of the previous chapters into a more coherent, integral period framework than previous studies. In the interests of specificity, my argument will distinguish between stylistic changes internal to the films and external changes in the writing, activities, and environment of the movement. Around 1918, certain French films exhibit a significant stylistic change, marking an initial trend which I shall call Impressionist pictorialism. This trend conSists of recurrent techniques which utilize pictorial qualities to indicate characters! psychological states. The pictorialist trend includes use of optical viewpoint Shots, superimpositions, gauze-focus, slow-motion, and distorted images; glance/object editing also plays a role at this stage of the style. Typically, all these stylistic devices are used to indicate a character's perceptions, dreams, memories, or fantasies. The freshness and force of this style may be seen by comparing Feuillade's Judex (1916) and Gance's J'Accuse (1919). In Feuillade's film, all the action is external, giving us no privileged access to characters' ‘consciousness. Feuillade consequently