Short summary about the French Impressionism and Surrealism

(Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson)

For the introduction about French Impressionism, here is a quick video that shows many impressionist films in France.

 French Impressionism, is a form of an avant garde style in film making , which focuses in giving narration considerable psychological depth, revealing the play of a character's consciousness. 

History

During the World War I, film studios in France shifted to wartime uses, most of which were shutdown and corrupted. Only two major firms remained, the Pathe Freres and Leon Gaumont. In order to fill vacant screens after the war, France was invaded with many American films. French film making never fully recovered and so, they began to produce films that is an imitation of American Hollywood genres. However, notable French directors such as Abel Gance, Lous Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, and Jean Epstein, paved way to a different style from their predecessors. In contrast to the belief of older directors, these young directors believed that Cinema is an art comparable from music and poetry, and it should be purely itself and not borrowed from theater or literature.

These younger directors experimented with cinema in ways that posed an alternative to Hollywood style. Aside from using emotion as its center, Impressionist films dominated psychological narration in its film making practice.

Characteristics

Impressionist films falls not on external physical behavior but on the inner action, it manipulates plot time and subjectivity. In order to depict memories, flashbacks were common, making the entire film sometimes  a series or a bulk of flashbacks. It also exaggerates the character's dreams, fantasies and mental states. Impressionism's emphasis on personal emotion gives the film's narratives an intensely psychological focus.

Here is an example of a French Impressionist film entitled, La Roue by Abel Gance (1922)

Mental states in an impressionism films is done through its cinematography and editing. Details including irises, masks, and super impositions function as traces of character's thoughts and feelings. 

Emotion of a female character showing her mental state

We can also see in an Impressionists' cinematography and editing the presentation of character's perceptual experience, their optical impressions. When a character in an Impressionist film gets drunk or dizzy, the filmmaker renders that experience through distorted or filtered shots or dizzy camera movements. Aside from this, impressionist films also used rhythmic editing to suggest the pace of an experience as a character feels it, moment by moment. When there is a scene of violence or turmoil, the rhythm accelerates. Other films include dance to emphasize an accelerated cutting rhythm.

Example of a rhythmic pattern in an Impressionism

End of French Impressionism?

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. They continued to operate, for example, in the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Maya Deren, in Hollywood montage sequences, and in certain American genres and styles (the horror film, film noir).

 Example of a modern French Impressionist film for me is Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese.