Juan Monroy — Outline: Week 5, French Avant-Garde

Decline of France’s Output
- Post World War I
- 30% of Films screened in France were French
- 1929 Features
  - France: 68
  - Germany: 220
  - USA: 562
- Factors
  - Rise of Imported films
  - Not much room to export
    - Belgium
    - Switzerland
    - French colonies
- Vertical Disintegration
  - Hollywood embraced vertical integration
  - Distribution
    - Pathe and Gaumont focused on distribution
    - No import quotas until 1930s
  - Not many resources put into production
    - Small production companies
    - director or actor raised money, often going out of business
    - low budgets
      - $30k France
      - $400k Hollywood
    - outdated facilities
      - glass studios
      - location work
      - few backlots at the studios
  - Exhibition
    - 80–90% of cinemas owned by individuals
    - wanted to show most profitable films (American)
Popular Films
- “Cinema libre”
  - documentary-like
  - location setting
  - avoidance of theatricality
- Serial Films
  - Gaumont and Pathé
  - high budget costume dramas
  - profitable when shown in multiple parts
- Historical Epics
- Fantasy Films
  - Rene Clair Paris Qui Dort (1924)
    - mysterious ray that paralyzes Paris
    - revived fantasy tradition of Melies
- Comedies
Louis Delluc
- set to link film with other art movements
- cinema’s distinctive qualities
- adored films of Griffith and Swedish films
- Photogenie
  - distinguishes film shot from original object being filmed
  - “each thing existing in the world knows another existence on the screen”
  - process of filming itself: lends an object a new expressiveness by giving the viewer a fresh perception of it
- Style of movement
  - belief in cinema as an art form
  - essays
  - manifestoes
- ciné clubs
  - build support for Deluc’s favorite films
  - attempt to convey emotional “impressions” and sensations
  - interested in rhythmical and lyrical possibilities of the medium
Impressionism
- Between 1918 and 1929
  - considered French cinema stodgy
  - preferred Hollywood films
- Pictorial Beauty
- Psychological Exploration
- Film was not theater
  - rhythm
  - aesthetic
  - naturalistic acting
- Impressionists
  - Marcel L’Herbier
  - Jean Epstein
  - Gance
- cinematographie
  - interest in using film to render interior state rather than external world
  - cinema as unique art form
  - conveying personal vision of the artist
  - all theorists agreed that film was opposite of theater thus opposite of most of the types of films being made in France at that time
    - avoid theatricality
    - need for more naturalistic acting, lighting
    - on location work
    - evocative landscapes
    - authentic village scenes
  - properties of camera
    - optical effects
    - point of view shots
    - superimpositions
    - filters all to convey character subjectivity
    - access to a realm beyond everyday experience
      - show us the souls of people and essences of objects
- Napoleon
  - Abel Gance
  - from elaborate dream sequences
  - extraordinary technical experimentation
  - changing 3 screens through framing
  - recreating colors of flag of France
Cinema Pur
- experimental films
  - graphic or temporal forms
  - no narrative
- eager audience
  - passionate intellectuals
  - artists gathered in Paris
  - film as the “seventh art”
- Entr’acte (1924)
Surrealism
- offhshoot from Freud
- dream and fantasy
- Un Chien Andalou (1926)