Film & Literature

French Impressionism and Surrealism (1918 – 1930)

Impressionism

1. An alternative movement within the commercial film industry.

2. Cinema should be an opportunity for the filmmaker to express feelings.
3. French Impressionism was opposed to the forms and narratives of Hollywood.
4. Impressionist film emphasized fleeting moods and shifting sensations.
5. Filmmakers were more concerned with psychological depth and revealing the
character’s inner consciousness; external behavior is not the focus.
6. Impressionists play with time and subjective experience by depicting memories,
dreams, fantasies, and mental states.
7. Impressionists used editing, masks, and superimpositions to present characters’
perceptions and optical impressions. Point-of-view cutting is especially important.
8. Rhythmic editing was used to suggest the pace of a character’s experience, moment by
moment.
9. The most important innovation was to use the camera to represent the character’s eyes.
By strapping the camera to cars, trains, and carousels, the filmmakers created the
illusion of subjective experience and movement.
10. Ultimately, Impressionism only appealed to an elite class of viewers that were
educated in the arts, and by 1929, the movement died.

Surrealism

1. An alternative movement that relied on patronage to support their work.

2. Films were screened primarily for small gatherings of artists.
3. The Surrealist film movement grew out of Surrealist literature and painting.
4. The ultimate aim was to shock and perplex audiences, to challenge their ways of
seeing, experiencing, and interpreting art.
5. Surrealist film is anti-narrative and against cause-and-effect relationships in narrative.
6. As in a dream, causality is often absent. Surrealist film merely registers images,
impressions, and experiences.
7. Character psychology is practically non-existent.
8. Common themes include: sexual desire, ecstasy, violence, and the bizarre.
9. Mise-en-scene is often influenced by Surrealist painting.
10. Discontinuous editing, dissolves, superimpositions, are used to fracture any sense of a
coherent narrative.