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

Page scan 000246 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 #:
000246
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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S| o% The immediate cause is acknowledged by 2@11 Impres~ sionist writers of the time and of later periods: the release of Abel Gance's La Roue. First presented privately in late December of 1922, premiering publicly in February of 1923, La Roue captured Impressionists with its innovative use of rhythmic and accelerated editing of trains and chases, Sometimes building to a climax in which shots were only one frame long. René Clair wrote that "We had already seen trains moving along tracks at a velocity heightened by the oblsaine moving camera, but we had not yet felt ourselves absorbed--orchestra, seats, auditorium and. everything around us--by the screen as by a whirlpool."<! Canudo praised La Roue's evocatively subjective editing: "Des images amorcées, suggérées plus que montrées enehevétrées dans le rythme haletant d'un train lancé a une vitesse folle, signifiant tout l'angoisse d'un homme poussé au paroxysme du désespoir."*2 Some saw ene film as a vindication of the purist assumptions: Dulac noted that "on peut €mouvoir sans personnage, done sans moyen de théatre: voyez la chanson du rail et des roues. Une théme, mais non un drame..."¢2 Epstein claimed that "Par ce film, le cinéma a pee le révélation de ses moyens propres, a pris conscience de sa personnalité, de sa capacité dtétre un art autonome."24 That the Impressionists were taken