French Impressionism and Surrealism (1918-1930)

From the same e-book Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson 
pp. 450-453

What you’re about to read are, again, my notes from the said lesson. Just like in my previous entry, I don’t take credit for mostly of the wordings used here, as these are mostly from the book mentioned above. I don’t mean to copy word per word as written in the book however it’s quite difficult to come up with something of my own especially when it’s about history. What I’m after here is the summarization of the lesson. So, here are my notes. :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Impressionism was a French avant-garde Film movement that was made by French Film Industry and proved financially successful.

sample of an Impressionist painting:
Claude Monet's Nympheas

Surrealism was made independently of the French system and did not prove finally successful. Allied with the Surrealist movement in other arts, these filmmakers relied on their own means and private patronage. France in the 1920s offers a striking instance of how different film movements may coexist at the same time and place.

sample of a Surrealist painting:Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

IMPRESSIONISM

World War I struck a serious blow to the French film industry. After the war, French filmmaking never fully recovered.

In the 1920s, French audiences saw eight times more Hollywood footage than domestic footage. The film industry tried in several ways to recapture the market, mostly through imitation of Hollywood production methods and genres. Artistically, however, the most significant move was the firms' encouragement of younger French directors: Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Gernraine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, and Jean Epstein.

These directors differed from their predecessors. The previous qeneration had regarded filmmaking as a commercial craft, but the younger filmmakers wrote essays proclaiming cinema was an art comparable to poetry, painting, and music.

Cinema should, they said, be purely itself and should not borrow from the theater or literature.

Between 1918 and 1928, the younger directors experimented with cinema in ways that posed an alternative to the dominant Hollywood formal principles.

Intimate psychological narrative dominated their filmmaking practice. Interactions of a few characters, usually love triangle, would serve as the basis for the filmmaker's exploration of fleeting moods and shifting sensations.

As in the Hollywood cinema, psychological causes were paramount, but the school gained the name impressionist because of its interest in giving narration considerable psychological depth, revealing the play of a character's consciousness. The interest falls not on external physical behavior but on inner action.

• Impressionist films manipulate plot time and subjectivity.
• To depict memories, flashbacks are common; sometimes the bulk of a film will be one flashback or a series of them.
• Even more striking is the films' insistence on registering characters' dreams, fantasies, and mental states.          
• Impressionism's emphasis on personal emotion gives the films' narratives an intensely psychological focus.

"Another period arrived, that of the psychological and impressionist film. It would seem stupid to place a character in a given situation without penetrating into the secret realm of his inner life, and the actor's performance is explained by the play of thoughts and of visualized sensations." - Germaine Dulac, director

Below is a video clip from YouTube. Germaine Dulac's The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923)

CINEMATOGRAPHY AND EDITING

In Impressionist films, irises, masks, and superimpositions function as traces of characters' thoughts and feelings. To intensify the subjectivity, the Impressionists' cinematography and editing present characters' perceptual experience their optical impressions.

The Impressionists also experimented with pronounced rhythmic editing to suggest the pace of an experience as a character feels it, moment by moment. During scenes of violence or emotional turmoil, the rhythm accelerates – the shots get shorter and shorter, building to a climax, sometimes with shots only a few frames long.

Impressionist form certain demands on film technology. Gance, the boldest innovator in this respect, used his epic Napoleon (1927) as a chance to try new lenses (even a 27 5mm telephoto), rnultiple frame images (called Polyvision), and widescreen ratio (the celebrated triptychs).

The most influential Impressionist technological innovation was the development of new means of frame mobility. If the camera was to represent a character's eyes, it should be able to move with the ease of a person.

Such formal, stylistic, and technological innovations had given French filmmakers the hope that their films could win the popularity granted to Hollywood's product. But by 1929, most foreign audiences had not taken to Impressionism; its experimentation was for elite tastes.

Impressionism as a distinct movement may be said to have ceased by 1929. But the influences of Impressionist form-the psychological narrative, subjective camera work, and editing were more long-lived.

SURREALISM

Surrealist cinema was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and painting

"Surrealism [was] based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association, heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought." - Andre Breton

Below is another video clip of Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and The Clergyman (1928). Thanks to YouTube!

Influenced by Freudian psychology, Surrealist art sought to register the hidden currents of the unconscious, "in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic and moral preoccupation."

Automatic writing and painting, the search for bizarre or evocative imagery, the deliberate avoidance of rationally explicable form or style became the features of Surrealism as it developed in the period 1924-1929. In due time, painters such as Man Ray and Salvador Dali and writers such as Antonin Artaud began dabbling in cinema, while the young Spaniard Luis Bunuel, drawn to Surrealism, became its most famous filmmaker.

from the film Un Chien Andalou

Surrealist cinema is overtly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself. In Dali and Bunuel Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928 - see illustrations on the left and below. Photos from the internet) the hero drags two pianos, stuffed with dead donkeys, across a parlor.

Many Surrealist films tease us to find a narrative logic that is simply absent. Causality is as evasive as in a dream. Instead, we find events juxtaposed for their disturbing effect.

An Impressionist film would motivate such events as a character's dreams or hallucinations, but in these films, character psychology is all but nonexistent. Sexual desire and ecstasy, violence, blasphemy, and bizarre humor furnish events that Surrealist film form employs with a disregard for conventional narrative principles.

The style of Surrealist cinema is eclectic. Mise-en-scene is often influenced by Surrealist painting. The ants in Un Chien andalou come from Dali's pictures; the pillars and city squares of The Seashell and the Clergyman hark back to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.

from the film Un Chien Andalou

Surrealist editing uses superimpositions, continuity editing and some devices of the dominant cinema. However, discontinuous editing is also commonly used to fracture any organized temporal-spatial coherence.

The fortunes of Surrealist cinema shifted with changes in the art movement as a whole. By late 1929, when Breton joined the Communist Party, Surrealists were embroiled in internal dissension about whether communism was a political equivalent of Surrealism. Thus, as a unified movement, French Surrealism was no longer viable after 1930.