French Impressionist Cinema - Theory

Theory

The narrative avant-garde did have a theoretical base, although its divergent articulation by different writer-filmmakers has confused the issue to a certain extent. Much of it is an extension of Symbolist poetics that posit a realm beyond matter and our immediate sense experience that art and the artist attempt to reveal and express 7. Bordwell goes on to point out the massive holes in this theorization, that the true nature of reality and experience are never established. Holes aside, the narrative avant-garde explores the perception of reality, and does so though two main concepts: subjectivity and photogénie. Neither of these terms is easily explainable, if at all, but that is part of the point - for these filmmakers cinema explored an unattainable understanding that can only be reached for. French impressionism destabilized familiar or objective ways of seeing, creating new dynamics of human perception. Using strange and imaginative effects, it altered traditional views and aimed to question the norm of the film industry at the time.

Subjectivity

Through the properties noted above in Bordwell’s stylistic paradigm, filmmakers sought to portray the internal state of the character or characters and in some of the later and more complex films attempt to bring the audience into the equation as subjective participant.

Photogénie

Photogénie occurs at the meeting of the profilmic (what is in front of the camera) and the mechanical and the filmmaker. It is above all a defamiliarization of the spectator with what appears on screen. It is a property that cannot be found in “reality” itself, a camera that is simply switched on does not record it, and a filmmaker cannot simply point it out. As Aitken summarizes, “…fully realized photogénie could only be manifested when its latent power was employed to express the vision of the film-maker, so that the inherent poetry of the cinema could be harnessed, and developed in a revelatory manner by the auteur” 8. However, the narrative avant-garde lacked a theoretical and philosophical base upon which these notions rest and thus the concept of photogénie is always on the edge of an inexplicable mysticism that many critics cannot accept.