French Impressionist Cinema

The impressionistic film is an aesthetic concept in the art of film, which is associated mainly with French films of the 1920s. Germaine Dulac directors like Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, Marcel L' Herbier and Dimitri Kirsanoff related in these works at the Impressionist paintings of the 19th century and to the music of Impressionism. The term was established by film historians such as Henri Langlois and Georges Sadoul.

Objectives

The directors tried following the Impressionist role models, to dissolve in their works of causal narrative logic and conventional forms of representation of reality. Instead, they staged their subjects as complex abundance of individual impressions. The cinema as a representation mechanism of an objectively describable world faded into the background, the film became the independent expression of subjective states of mind beyond the physical reality of things. The impressionistic film so paved the way for the abstraction of the Cinéma Pur.

Method

Preferably used forms and objects of impressionistic film were found as the picturesque models in the wild: mist and cloud formations, the game of raindrops and water surfaces, light reflections and shadows. These natural aesthetics was made ​​dynamic through the center of the film. Fast assembly and abrupt change of attitude, use of time-lapse, Soft Focus, Double Exposure, consciously uses to blur and an extremely mobile camera work were the preferred style means. Directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti ( Rien que les heures, 1926) and Abel Gance ( The Wheel, 1923) transferred this dynamic expression on the world of experience of modern urban life and staged urban realities such as rail transport as confusing, quick change of individual sensations. Dramaturgical means such as a non-linear narrative and insertion of acausal, rather associative memory fragments also resulted in a representation of the protagonists, mostly seemed mentally unstable and oversensitive.