French Impressionism (Theory)
Between 1918 and 1929,
1) a new generation of filmmakers sought to explore the cinema as an art form.
(From textbook...Impressionist saw art as a form of expression, conveying the personal vision of the artist: art creates an experience, and that leads to emotions for the spectator. Art creates these feeling not by making direct statements but by evoking or suggesting them.
Artworks create fleeting feelings , or impressions.
2)These directors considered French filmmaking stodgy and preferred the lively
Hollywood films that had flooded into France during the war.
3)Because their films displayed a fascination with pictorial beauty and an interest in
intense psychological exploration, this movement came to be called Impressionism.
The Impressionists’ Relation to the Industry
1)These young filmmakers were aided by the crises that plagued the French industry.
2)Because companies would often shift their policies or reorganize, filmmakers had
various ways of obtaining financing.
3)Some Impressionist directors also divided their time between avant-garde projects and
more profit-oriented films.
4)Germaine Dulac made some important Impressionist films, including The Smiling
Madame Beudet and Gossette (both 1923), but she spent much of her career making more
conventional dramas.
5)Similarly, Jean Epstein directed costume pictures in between some of his most
experimental works.
6)Jacques Feyder was among the more commercially successful of French directors in the
1920s, making a huge hit, L’Atlantide, in 1921;
7) yet he made Impressionist films from 1923 to 1926.
8)This strategy helped keep the movement going for over a decade.
The first director to depart from established traditions was Abel Gance,
1)who had entered filmmaking in 1911 as a scenarist and then began directing.
2)Aside from making an unreleased Méliès-like fantasy, La Folie du Docteur Tube
(“The Madness of Doctor Tube,” 1915), he had worked on commercial projects.
3)With a passion for Romantic literature and art, however, Gance aspired to make more
personal works.
4)His La Dixième Symphonie (1918) is the first major film of the Impressionist movement.
5)It concerns a composer who writes a symphony so powerful that his friends consider it a
successor to Beethoven’s nine symphonies.
6)Gance suggests the listeners’ emotional reactions to the score by a series of visual devices.
7)Such attempts to convey sensations and emotional “impressions” would become
central to the Impressionist movement.
La Dixième Symphonie (Abel Gance, 1918)
Intertitle: A Year Later. The famous composer Enric Damor,
Ignores Eve Dinant's past and tires to make her his wife.
ignorant le passe d'Eve Dinant, vient d'en faire sa femme
2)who continued to finance and distribute Gance’s films after the director formed his own
production company.
3)This was risky, since some Gance films like J’Accuse and La Roue were lengthy and
expensive.
4)Yet Gance was the most popular of the Impressionists.
5)In 1920, an informal poll ranked the public’s favorite films.
6)The only French productions near the top were by Gance
(the favorites being De Mille’s The Cheat and Chaplin’s short comedies).
The other major firm, Gaumont,
1)was making most of its money from Feuillade serials.
2)It invested some of the profits in a group of films by Marcel L’Herbier,
whose debut work, Rose-France, was the second Impressionist film.
3)This allegory of war-battered France was so symbolic as to be nearly incomprehensible,
and it was not widely seen.
4)Still, L’Herbier made two more Impressionist films, L’Homme du Large and El
Dorado, for Gaumont, and by 1920 critics began to notice that France had a cinematic
avant-garde.
Jean Epstein,
1)who was to make some of the most experimental of the Impressionist films,
2)began with a quasi-documentary, Pasteur (1923), for Pathé.
3)Germaine Dulac was hired to direct her avant-garde character study
The Smiling Madame Beudet by the Film d’Art company,
4)which originated the project as an adaptation of a recent successful play.
5)The Smiling Madame Beudet is often considered one of the first (if not the first) feminist films.
The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1923)
Behind the facades of tranquil mansions, there are souls...passions...
Madame Beudet...(Germaine Dermoz)
Of the trading firm Beudet-Lebas: Mr. Las... (Jean D'yd)
and Mr. Beudet. Cloth merchant, (Alexandre Arquilliere)
Close up of Beudet at a supervisor desk - looking out upon the workers
black out
2)conveying the personal vision of the artist:
3)art creates an experience,
4)and that experience leads to emotions for the spectator.
5)Art creates these feelings not by making direct statements but by evoking or suggesting
them.
6)In short, artworks create fleeting feelings, or impressions.
7)By the 1920s, this view of art was a bit old-fashioned,
being rooted in nineteenth-century Romantic and Symbolist aesthetics.
2) or created a totally new art form,
3)all theorists agreed that film is the opposite of theater.
4)They condemned much French production as mere imitation of the stage,
5)believing that in order to avoid theatricality, films should display naturalistic acting.
6)And indeed, the acting in many Impressionist films is strikingly restrained.
7)Similarly, the Impressionists preferred location shooting to artificial sets,
8) and their films contain many evocative landscapes and authentic village scenes.
SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS. The Establishing Shot or sequence serves to situate the audience within a particular environment or setting and/ or to introduce an important character or characters
Rhythm in film editing is time, energy, and movement shaped by timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of creating cycles of tensions and release (Pearlman 2009, 2016)
Spatial Relations. constructing film space; shots that establish a spatial whole followed by shots of part of the space or
constructing the whole space out of shots of the parts.
Rhythm in film editing is time, energy, and movement shaped by timing, pacing,
and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of creating cycles of tensions and
release (Pearlman 2009, 2016).Oct 31, 2019
- Spatial Editing: Definition: Spatial editing is when the relations between shots function to construct film space.
- Temporal Editing: Definition: Temporal editing is when the relations between shots function to control time.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~film01/editing.html
It creates spatial relationships, as architecture, painting, and sculptures do.
Because cinema is also a temporal art, it combines its spatial qualities with rhythmic relationships comparable to those of music, poetry, and dance.
abstract films that concentrated on graphic and temporal form, often with no narrative.
2)the Impressionists often referred to the concept of
photogénie, a term that indicates something more than being “photogenic.”
3)For them, photogénie was the basis of cinema.
4)Louis Delluc popularized the term around 1918,
5)using it to define that quality that distinguishes a film shot from the original object
photographed.
6)The process of filming, according to Delluc,
by giving the viewer a fresh perception of it. ****
1)With respect to film form, the Impressionists insisted that cinema should not imitate
theatrical or literary narratives.
2)They also argued that film form should be based on visual rhythm.
3)This idea stems from the Impressionists’ belief that emotions, rather than stories,
should be the basis for films.
4)The rhythm arises from the careful juxtaposition of the movements within the shots
and the lengths of the shots themselves.
5)In a lecture, Germaine Dulac analyzed the rhythm of a moment in Marcel Silver’s
L’Horloge (“The Clock,” 1924) in which a calm love scene abruptly ends as the
pair realize they must return home immediately:
By the choice of images,
their length,
and their contrasts,
rhythm becomes the sole source of emotion.
reactions to story action rather than focusing solely on the action itself.
2)The Impressionists insisted that their attention to rhythm put their films closer to
music than to any other art form.
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