French Impressionism And Surrealism

Hi again! So here are my notes about French Impressionism and surrealism. By the way, I found a hard time searching for the page of the article in the book because I was following the pages in Adobe reader, just sharing haha.

Impressionism

This film movement started when the World War I began to struck the movie industry in France. There were only two film firms at that time and exporting of movies was stopped. They can't produce their own movies so that they imported so many Hollywood films to the point that the are Hollywood films are more known than the French films. Then the young directors such as, Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Gernraine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, and Jean Epstein started to make films that are not for commercial's sake but for art's sake and they penetrated to the French film industry.

Impressionism is more about the inner thoughts and the psychological processes that is happening to every person in the film. Flashback were common to suggest that a person in the film is thinking about the his/her past. Thinking of one's dreams, fantasies and mental states was also prevalent. Emotion is the center and the backbone of Impressionist films.

The impressionist also spearheaded the use of pronounced rhythm editing to their films. When the action comes to a violent or emotional turmoil the rhythm is faster and the shots will be shorter and shorter but when the reaching the climax it will be longer. They also used point-of-view shots heavily.

La Roue's train scene

The movement came to end on 1929 because the French masses seems to like sound films more and only elites were the ones who appreciate it due to its formality. But many filmmakers were influenced by the French Impressionism such as Alfred Hitchcock.

Surrealism

Out of this world. Anti-narrative.

This are just few descriptions that I can say about surrealism. According to the book, the surrealist relied mo on private showing rather that on commercial film industry. Surrealism was heavily influenced by the surrealist  literature and paintings, which are out of this world too, dreamlike.

If I were to compare it to Impressionism, they are exactly opposites because Impressionism is more about the logical thinking of a person in the film and surrealism provides no logic at all.

Surrealism distorts causality because a specific action can be done in the film without any logical reason behind it. One good example of this is, in the film Un Chien Andalou, flies come out of the hands of a man.

Anton Breton

When the spokesperson of Surrealism, Anton Breton joined a communist party in 1929, the surrealism movement also went down.

Hope that you learned new things about these two film movements today! :)

-KC