Impressionism

Impressionism was a style of representational art that did not necessarily rely on realistic
depictions. Scientific thought at the time was beginning to recognize that what the eye perceived
and what the brain understood were two different things. The Impressionists sought to capture
the former - the optical effects of light - to convey the passage of time, changes in weather, and
other shifts in the atmosphere in their canvases.
French impressionist cinema, also referred to as the first avant-garde or narrative avant-garde, is
a term applied to a group of French films and filmmakers of the 1920s.
Film scholars have had much difficulty in defining this movement or for that matter deciding
whether it should be considered a movement at all.
The French Impressionist filmmakers took their name from their painterly compatriots and
applied it to a 1920s boom in silent film that jolted cinema in thrilling new directions. The
devastation of World War I parlayed into films that delved into the darker corners of the human
psyche and had a good rummage about while they were there. New techniques in non-linear
editing, point-of-view storytelling and camera work abounded
Key filmmakers: Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein
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.
Abel refers to the movement as the Narrative Avant-Garde. He views the films as a reaction to
narrative paradigm found in commercial filmmaking, namely that of Hollywood, and is based on
literary and generic referentiality, narration through intertitles, syntactical continuity, a rhetoric
based on verbal language and literature, and a linear narrative structure 6, then subverts it, varies
it, deviates from it