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 #:
000235
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

though not the very first instance of Impressionist pictior:-: ialism,¢ is a clear example of how that style differed from the mise-en-scéne Style of directors like Feuillade in the pre-1918 period. The emerging pictorialist style, which was to continue throughout the 1920's, includes Gance's La Dixiéme Symphonie (1918) and J'Accuse (1919), L'Herbier's RoseFrance (1919), Carnival des Vérités (1920), L'Homme du Large (1920), El Dorado (1921), and Don Juan et Faust (1922), Delluc's La Féte Espagnole (1920), Fiévre (1921), and La Femme de Nulle Part (1922), and Dulac's La Souriante Mme. Beudet (1922). All use the subjective style of pictorialism to go beyond external action and evoke the psychic flow of the characters. As Dulac writes in describing the films of the period: L'on ajouta 4 ses gestes, la vision de ses pensées, de ses sentiments, de ses sensations. Joindre aux faits précis d'un drame, la déscription des impresSions intérieures multiples et contraires; au cours d'une action, les faits n'existaient plus en euxy-mémes, mais devenaient la conséquence d'un 6tat moral. Given such a change in film style, we may discover its historical sources in several external preconditions and two specific and immediate causes. Most generally; the French film industry at the period had some tolerance of new styles in film-making. The American conquest of the market after 1916 had convinced