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French Impressionism, Poetic Realism, & “International Style”

Chapters 4, 8, & 13

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French Cinema in the 1920s

  • Post-WWI
  • More American films in France than French films
    • France produced fewer than 100 films a year while the U.S. produced more than 500 a year!
  • French film industry in crisis throughout the 1920s
    • Willing to experiment to find a distinctly “French” cinema to compete in the world market
  • Industry disunity
  • Lack of capital
  • Limited technical resources
    • Artificial lighting

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French Impressionism

  • Typical French serial films, fantasy films, and comedies most popular
  • What is art?
    • Art as a “form of expression, conveying the personal vision of the artist: art creates an experience, and that experience leads to emotions for the spectator” (77)
    • “Art creates these feelings not by making direct statements but by evoking or suggesting them” (77)
    • In short, fleeting feelings or impressions…
    • Cinema as art - a synthesis of the other art forms, and/or a wholly new art form in itself...
  • French Impressionism
    • 1918-1929
    • Pictorial beauty
    • Intense psychological exploration
    • Attempts to convey sensations and emotional “impressions”
    • Rhythm is central

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Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Renoir, 1876) & Impression, Sunrise (Monet, 1872)

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Afternoon Tea (Bracquemond, 1880) & Lady at her Toilet (Morisot, 1880)

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French Impressionism Cont...

  • Independent productions allowed Impressionists to push their experiments further
  • Cinema gives us access to a realm beyond everyday experience
    • Shows us the souls of people and the essences of objects
  • Cinema should not imitate theater or literature
  • Cinema should be based on visual rhythm
    • Emotions, rather than stories, should be the basis for films
    • Closer to music than any other art form

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Photogenie

  • Photogenie - basis of cinema, lends filmed objects new expressiveness
  • Deluc and Epstein - Fresh perception, act of looking, beautiful moments, transcendent, filmic
  • Kirsanoff: “Each thing existing in the world knows another existence on the screen”
  • Similar to Russian Formalism’s concept: “defamiliarization”
  • Subjective…
  • Created by properties of the camera
    • Framing isolates objects from their environment
    • Black-and-white film stock transforms their appearance
    • Special optical effects change them

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Photogenie

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Formal Traits

  • Function to convey character subjectivity
    • Mental images, visions, dreams, memories, etc.
  • POV shots
  • Characters’ perceptions of events rendered without POV shots
  • Superimpositions
  • Flashbacks
  • Filters
    • Shots through curtains and the like
  • Mobile camera and slow motion
  • Quick edits
  • Intense lighting effects
  • Mixture of modernist decor and real locations
  • Somewhat typical, dramatic narratives

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The End in the Late 20s

  • Film industry starting to thrive again
  • Less opportunity for independent filmmaking
  • Sound film takes over
  • Influenced German Expressionism (and possibly vice versa)
  • Influenced Hitchcock for sure

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These are distinct from Surrealist, Dadaist, and abstract films that we’ll see in Ch. 8...

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The Tenth Symphony (Gance, 1918)

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Napoleon (Gance, 1927) & The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1923)

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La Roue (Gance, 1922)

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Feu Mathias Pascal (L’Herbier, 1926)

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Poetic Realism

  • 1930s loose tendency (similar to French Impressionism or Soviet Montage in that regard)
  • Influenced by Impressionism
  • Characters living on the margins of society
  • Main characters are given a last chance at love
  • Films often end in disillusionment and/or death of the main character
  • Nostalgia and melancholy
  • Precursor to Italian Neorealism
  • Lots of camera movements and long takes (unusual for the time)
  • Great depth of field
  • Captured the atmosphere of France right before WWII

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Pepe Le Moko (Duvivier, 1937) & Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937)

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The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

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“International Style”

  • Western nations influencing each other
  • German Expressionism and French Impressionism certainly drew from each other
  • Impressionists took the strange set and costume designs
  • Expressionists took the subjective camera and superimpositions
  • By the mid-1920s, the differences between the two became blurred
  • These European styles influenced the quick editing and exaggerated performance of the Soviets in the mid-20s
  • In turn, the Soviets influenced European films that were politically charged

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The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924) & The Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein, 1928)

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Carl Dreyer: “European Director”

  • Epitome of “international style”
  • Was able to work in several European countries
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
    • Blended influences from French, German, and Soviet avant-garde movements
    • Decentered close-ups
    • Black-and-white backgrounds
    • Revealed every facial detail
    • Expressionist set designs
    • Accelerated subjective editing likened to Soviet Montage and French Impressionists
  • Vampyr (1932)
    • Unexplained, barely glimpsed terrors
    • Lots of offscreen action - the camera only barely misses
    • Again, bizarre uses of French, German, and Soviet influences

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The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) & Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932)