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 #:
000258
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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245 que nous dispensent la poésie ou la musique. "20 The Impressionists' search for cinematic specificity was extended to an elimination of all materials common to literature or theatre and film. Cinema should not use language; thus ensued the long debate over the propriety of dialogue ti tles.?! Cinema, it was urged, shouldnottellstories. "As long as the film is based on fiction or the theatre," claimed Léger, "It will be nothing.">¢ Though Impressionists frequently called this or that filma "visual symphony," the term was used either for emotional effect or as a suggestion that its formal organization was akin (in some unspecified way) to that of music. Of the Impressionists, only Dulac used the term to suggest an abstract cinema. In effect, the theory of the abstract cinema extended and deepened the musical analogy. Cinema can juxtapose abStract images in a rhythm purged of reference; it. thysirbe~ comes, for the abstract-film movement, a visual music , a purified system that does not represent reality. The painter Marcel Gromaire claimed that "La musique visuelle, fait de couleurs et de formes, 6tant infiniment riche en combinaisons, les sentiments 4 traduire devront se présenter sous forme de symboles qualitativement trés variés.?° AS was shown in Chapter I, the distinction between the Impressionist avant-garde and the abstract film avant garde was recognized at the time.>4 Relations were not