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

Page scan 000267 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 #:
000267
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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O54 style is at odds vite av ewhveRtaunkr narrative. The ImpresSionists who made films for the mass audience were conscious of the contradiction but usually resolved it by appeal to the stereotype of the imprisoned artist. Here is Dulac: "Sans doute demanderez-vous dans lequel de ces films j'ai appliqué les principes que je vous ai exposés tout 4 l'heure. C'est que je ne suis pas libre; je dépends du public, un public auquel on a raconté Ges historiettes, qui ne veut pas revenir de ses erreurs pour exercer utilement son sens visuel."/3 One way or another, each Impressionist reached his or her own practical compromise with the problem of elitism, but the fissure in their avant-garde ideology remained. Aside from the errors of excluding certain directors from consideration and of marking off a cinematic elite, we could follow critics like Jean Mitry and Jacques Brunius and itemize other defects in the Impressionist movement. In striving for experiment, Impressionist style sometimes collapses into either pomposity (e.g., some of Gance's and L'Herbier's works) or inconsistency (e.g., the frequent failure to unify an entire’ film > stylistically and thematically). As Chapter III has suggested, moreover, Impressionist theory is sketchily developed and frequently obscure. All of these problems were isolated at the time