"These filmmakers were aided by the crises that plagued the French industry. Because companies would often shift their policies or reorganize, filmmakers had various ways of obtaining financing. Some Impressionist directors also divided their time between avant-garde projects and more profit-oriented films. Germaine Dulac made some important Impressionist films, including La souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet) and Gossette (both 1923), but she spent much of her career making more conventional dramas. Similarly, Jean Epstein directed costume pictures in between some of his most experimental works. Jacques Feyder was among the more commercially successful of French directors in the 1920s, making a huge hit, L'Atlantide, in 1921; yet he made Impressionist films from 1923 to 1926. Few Impressionists had the luxury of working full-time in their preferred style, yet they kept the movement going for over a decade.
La dixième symphonie (1918)
Despite their avant-garde proclivities, these directors had to make their way within the regular commercial firms. The first to depart from established stylistic traditions was Abel Gance, who had entered filmmaking in 1911 as a scenarist and then began directing. With a passion for Romantic literature and art, however, Gance aspired to make more personal works. His La dixième symphonie (1918) is the first major film of the Impressionist movement. It concerns a composer who writes a symphony so powerful that his friends consider it a successor to Beethoven's nine symphonies. Gance suggests the listeners' emotional reactions to the score by a series of visual devices. Such attempts to convey sensations and emotional "impressions" would become central to the Impressionist movement.