Whether French Impressionist Cinema even ought to be considered a film movement in the true sense is itself a highly contentious point. The fact is that films considered Impressionist bear a wide variety of qualities, and there was no centrally-run effort to coordinate these productions under a specific set of goals. However, certain characteristics can be determined to circumscribe the movement, the most prominent of which is put best by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell-- "The Impressionists saw art as a form of expression, conveying the personal vision of the artist: art creates an experience, and that experience leads to emotions for the spectator.... In short, artworks create fleeting feelings, or impressions."[5] Impressionism was based around the theory of photogénie, which is not the same as being photogenic but instead describes a unique quality that objects take on when they are photographed. Photogénie is, in a sense, the new life of an object on film, which is informed by cinematic decisions like framing, optical effects, and so on. Impressionist directors saw this principle as the distinguishing strength of the film medium, rather than narrative, which they believed to belong to the older arts of literature and theatre. Film, as a new art and a synthesis of all other arts, had the unique ability to render character's subjective experiences through visual elements of photogénie. In this way, Impressionism was truly the cinema of subjectivity. Directors used point-of-view (POV) shots to show what a character saw, and filters to distort that character's vision or to point out the focus of their attention. They used masks to reshape a shot and emphasize its photogénie. They superimposed one image onto another to suggest character's thought process or to evoke an inner "impression." They blurred the image, distorted it with mirrors, set the lens out of focus, or did anything else to convey their characters' subjective inner states. Additionally, they were the first to use so-called "subliminal cuts" by editing together shots of only a few frames each into sequences that flashed like lightning.[6] An interesting point of comparison is Impressionist Cinema with Impressionist Painting. Although these two movements have little or no connection whatsoever, Impressionist Cinema can be best understood by the analogy that just as the painters used spots of color to force viewers to complete the picture in their minds, so did the filmmakers use editing and invasive camera techniques to force viewers to experience the "impression" in their minds