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 #:
000250
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.

Delluc noted that certain pictorial effects had become cli= chés and were used illogically.?9 Init924, Clair called for the avant-garde to rid’cinema*"of''all the false art that is smothering it," and he claimed provocatively that Chaplin's A Woman of Paris was "the most novel of the season. This leads us to reflect on the excessiveness of the purely technical experiments which have interested us so deeply in France."'9 ana in January of 1925, a writer in CinéaCiné pour Tous charged the avant-garde with abusing optical effects. 41 Rhythmic montage, like subjective camerawork and optical devices, continued through the 1920's in films by Epstein, L'Herbier, Autant-Lara, Clair, Volkov, Dulac, Feyder, Gance, and Kirsanov, but by 1925 members of the movement were aware of how the style could:-degenerate into empty virtuosity. Activities in other strata of the movement suggest that around 1925 the possibilities of Impressionist film theory crystalized as clearly as those of the style had. In that year, Leon Moussinac published his book Naissance du Cinéma, which synthesized the primary tenets of ImpresSionist film theory and thereby constituted a summa of the dominant critical-theoretical position that had emerged between 1917 and 1924. The book's preface, which lists the Impressionists! cinematic touchstones (The: (Cheag, Ince's and Griffith's work, the Swedish films, the German t