"In the late 1910s and the first half of the 1920s, the Impressionists formed a tightly knit group, supporting each other in their mission to establish an a lternative, artistic cinema. By mid-decade, they had succeeded to a considerable extent. While many of their films did not attract large audiences, they often received favorable reviews and were appreciated by the audiences of the cine-clubs and art theaters. In 1925, Leon Moussinac, a leftist critic sympathetic to the Impressionists, published Naissance du cinema ("The Birth of the Cinema"); there he summed up the movement's stylistic traits and the theoretical views of its filmmakers. Largely based on Delluc's writings, Moussinac's account stressed expressive techniques like slow motion and superimpositions, and it singled out the Impressionist group as the most interesting French filmmakers. His summary came at an appropriate time, since no significant concepts were developed in Impressionist theory after this point.
Finis terrae (1929)
There was also a growing sense that the very success of Impressionism had led to a diffusion of its techniques and hence to a lessening of their impact. In 1927, Epstein remarked, "Original devices such as rapid montage or the tracking or panning camera are now vulgarized. They are old hat, and it is necessary to eliminate visibly obvious style in order to create a simple film." Indeed, Epstein increasingly presented simple stories in a quasi-documentary style, using nonactors and eliminating flashy Impressionist camera work and editing. His last Impressionist film, Finis Terrae, portrays two young lighthouse keepers on a rugged island; subjective camera techniques appear mainly when one youth falls ill. Epstein's early sound film, Mor-Vran (1931) eschews Impressionist style altogether in a restrained, poetic narrative of villagers on a desolate island.
Perhaps because the style's techniques were becoming somewhat commonplace, other Impressionist filmmakers began to experiment in different directions. If the era from 1918 to 1922 can be said to have been characterized primarily by pictorialism, and the period from 1923 to 1925 by the addition of rhythmic cutting, then the later years, 1926 to 1929, saw a greater diffusion in the movement. By 1926 some Impressionist directors had achieved considerable independence by forming their own small producing companies. Moreover, the support provided by the cine-clubs and small cinemas now allowed the production of low- budget experimental films. As a result of both these factors, the late Impressionist period saw a proliferation of short films, such as Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant and the four films produced by Les Films Jean Epstein.
La coquille et le clergyman (1928)
Another factor diversifying the Impressionist movement was the impact of experimental films. Surrealist, Dadaist, and abstract films often shared the programs of the cine-clubs and art cinemas with Impressionist films in the mid- to late 1920s. These tendencies were lumped in the category of cinema pur. Dulac wrote and lectured extensively in favor of cinema pur, and in 1928 she abandoned commercial filmmaking to direct a Surrealist film, La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). Thereafter she concentrated on abstract short films
Such stylistic diffusion might eventually have destroyed any unity among the Impressionists' work and ended the movement. In any event, the late 1920s saw a swift decline in these directors' independence. For one thing, their situation as small producers had always been shaky. They did not own their own studios but had to rent facilities for shooting. Each film had to be financed separately, and a filmmaker's credit was typically based on the success of the previous film.
The introduction of sound in 1929 made it virtually impossible for the Impressionists to regain their independence. Sound production was costly, and it became more difficult to scrape together financing for even a short, low-budget, avant-garde feature . In 1968, L'Herbier recalled the situation:
When sound arrived, the working conditions in the profession became very difficult for a director like me. lt was out of the question, for economic reasons, to envision films in the talking era like those which we had made in the silent era, perhaps even at the author's [i.e., the director's] expense. One had to censor oneself considerably and even, in my case, to adopt forms of cinema which I had always held in contempt. All at once, we were constrained, on account of talk, to do canned theater pieces, pure and simple.
Although the French cinema of the 1930s created several distinctive trends, none of the major Impressionist filmmakers played a prominent role in that creation. Despite the Impressionist films' limited circulation abroad, they influenced other filmmakers. The freely moving camera used to convey a character's perceptual experience was quickly picked up by German filmmakers, who popularized this technique and usually have gotten credit for inventing it. Perhaps the most famous artist to carry on the Impressionist tradition was the young designer and director Alfred Hitchcock, who absorbed influences from American, French, and German films during the 1920s. His 1927 film The Ring could pass for an Impressionist film, and during his long career, Hitchcock became a master of the precise, using camera placement, framing, special effects, and camera movement to convey what his characters see and think. Character subjectivity has long been a staple element of storytelling, and the Impressionists were the filmmakers who explored this aspect of film most thoroughly." [1]
Filmography