During the silent era, a number of film movements in France posed major alternatives to classical Hollywood narrative form. Some of these alternatives - abstract cinema, Dada filmmaking - are not specifically French and constituted instead a part of the growing international avant-garde. But two alternatives to the American mode remained quite localized. Impressionism was an avant-garde style that operated largely within the film industry. Most of the Impressionist filmmakers started out working for major French companies, and some of their avant-garde works proved financially successful. In the mid-1920s, most formed their own independent companies but remained within the mainstream commercial industry by renting studio facilities and releasing their films through established finns. The other alternative movement, Surrealism, lay largely outside the film industry. Allied with the Surrealist movement in other arts, these filmmakers relied on their own means and private patronage. France in the 1920s offers a striking instance of how different film movements may coexist at the same time and place." [1] Between 1918 and 1929, a new generation of filmmakers sought to explore the cinema as an art. Their films displayed a fascination with pictorial beauty and an interest in intense psychological exploration.