French Impressionism and Surrealism (summary)

French Impressionism

French Impressionist Cinema, also sometimes known as The First Avant-Garde or Narrative Avant-Garde, is a name for a loose association of French films and filmmakers operating primarily between 1919 and 1929.  It is generally considered to be one of the important branches of early international cinema and its influence today is widespread.

France, being one of the centers of film in the medium's formative years, did not escape from the trauma that World War One left therefore reducing the country to a struggling minor part in film history after 1918. France's film exports were mostly limited to those countries with which it already had steady cultural exchange such as Belgium, Switzerland and other French colonies. This was because France was unable to compete with Hollywood which dominated the market by the end of 1917 producing eight times more than local or domestic footage.

The most significant move was the firm’s encouragement of younger directors who were so unlike their predecessors. The previous generation considered filmmaking as a business while the younger filmmakers compared cinema as to be art meaning poetry, painting and music. Cinema, they said should be an occasion for artists to express feelings, be purely itself, and should not be borrowed from theater and literature.

Because of the school’s interest in giving narration considerable psychological depth, revealing the character’s consciousness, it was given the name Impressionist. The interest falls not on physical behavior but on inner action or the intention. Impressionist films exploit plot time and subjectivity. To intensify the subjectivity, the Impressionists’ cinematography and editing present characters’ perceptual experience, their optical impressions. Furthermore, they also experimented with pronounced rhythmic editing to suggest the pace of an experience as a character feels it, moment by moment.

Impressionism in films ceased in 1929 but its influences such as psychological nature, subjective camera work and editing were more long-lived.

Surrealism

            While the French Impressionist filmmakers focused on the commercial aspect of films, Surrealist filmmakers relied on private patronage and screened their work in small artists’ gatherings. Surrealist cinema was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and painting and it sought to register the hidden currents of the unconscious.

            Surrealist cinema is overly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself that is why 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 adjacent for their disturbing effect.