French Impressionism

Lecture 10

French Impressionism 1918-1929• Economic Context– Weak French film industry after WWI• 20% of films exhibited were French; the rest were

American and German• Fewer than 100 features produced per year compared with

over 500 American films and over 200 German films• companies were not vertically integrated (i.e. production

was distinct from exhibition and distribution)

– Small production companies• First Avant-Garde movement

• How and why did the first avant-garde emerge in France when it did?– French film could not compete with Hollywood– The emergence of an alternative film culture

• Weekly film magazine– Le Film, begun by Louis Delluc in 1917– Ciné-pour-tous, 1919

• The ciné-clubs– “The Friends of the Seventh Art” club

» First in the world ciné-club» Founded by Ricciotto Canudo in 1920

• Alternative film circuit– Jean Tedesco established Vieux Colombier (specialist art film

theater) in 1924

French Narrative Avant-garde (a.k.a. French Impressionism): 1918-1929

• Between nineteenth the century Realism (external reality) and Modernism (material became the subject of art)

• French narrative avant-garde has been under studied by scholars– Modernist non-narrative films• Dada

– Ex: Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924)

• Surrealism– Ex: Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1928)

FERNAND LÉGER: “MECHANICAL ELEMENTS” 1924

Fernand Léger: “The City” 1919

FERNAND LÉGER: “CHARLOT CUBISTE” 1924

French Impressionism in PaintingClaude Monet “Impression: Sunrise” 1872

French Narrative Avant-garde (a.k.a. French Impressionism): 1918-1929

• Termed “Impressionism” by Germaine Dulac:– “Impressionism made us see nature and its objects as elements concurrent

with the action. A shadow, a light, a flower had, above all, a meaning, as a reflection of a mental state or an emotional situation, then, little by little, became a necessary complement, having an intrinsic value of its own. We experimented with making things move through the science of optics, tried to transform figures according to the logic of a state of mind.” (quoted in Abel, 1987)

• “psychological cinema”: concerned with subjectivity and subjective experience

• Shift in attention from action and narration to description and representation; from temporal progression to spatial composition or mise-en-scene. (from Abel, 1988)

• Marcel L’Herbier: “None of us—Dulac, Epstein, Delluc or myself—had the same aesthetic outlook. But we had a common interest, which was the investigation of that famous cinematic specificity. On this we agreed completely.” (quoted in Abel 1987, 290)

The Shot

Three Phases

• 1) 1918-1922 pictorialist• 2) 1922-1925/1926 (most unified)– Rapid cutting as in La Roue (Gance, 1922)– Ex: The Smiling Madame Beudet

• 3) 1926-1929– Stylistic diffusion– Ex: Menilmontant and The Fall of the House of

Usher

FRENCH IMPRESSIONISM: MODE OF REPRESENTATION

1. On subject matter or referentiality– Standard: literary text adapted for screen esp.

melodrama, naturalist novel, historical epic– Narrative avant-garde:

• Substituted reality for literature– Louis Delluc: “So you have nothing to say? Walk about, look

around you, really look. The street, the subway, the streetcars, the shops are filled with a thousand dramas, a thousand good and original stories.” (quoted in Abel 1988)

– Auteur vs. metteur-en-scene

• Photogénie (from a collection with the same title, written by Louis Delluc in 1920)