French Impressionist Cinema

• Pictorialism (beginning in 1918): made up of films that focus mainly on manipulation of the film as image, through camerawork, mise-en-scene, and optical devices. • Montage (beginning in 1923): at which point rhythmic and fast-paced editing became more widely used. • Diffusion (beginning in 1926): at which point films and filmmakers began to pursue other stylistic and formal modes.

Based on David Bordwell's family resemblance model:

However, even Marcel L’Herbier, one of the chief filmmakers associated with the movement, admitted to an ununified theoretical stance: "None of us – Dulac, Epstein, Delluc or myself – had the same aesthetic outlook. But we had a common interest, which was the investigation of that famous cinematic specificity. On this we agreed completely." Richard Abel's re-evaluation of Bordwell's analysis sees the films as a reaction to conventional stylistic and formal paradigms, rather than Bordwell's resemblance model. Thus Abel refers to the movement as the Narrative Avant-Garde. He views the films as a reaction to narrative paradigm found in commercial filmmaking, namely that of Hollywood, and is based on literary and generic referentiality, narration through intertitles, syntactical continuity, a rhetoric based on verbal language and literature, and a linear narrative structure, then subverts it, varies it, deviates from it.

Through the properties noted above in Bordwell's stylistic paradigm, filmmakers sought to portray the internal state of the character or characters and in some of the later and more complex films attempt to bring the audience into the equation as subjective participant.

Photogénie occurs at the meeting of the profilmic (what is in front of the camera) and the mechanical and the filmmaker. It is above all a defamiliarization of the spectator with what appears on screen. It is a property that cannot be found in "reality" itself, a camera that is simply switched on does not record it, and a filmmaker cannot simply point it out. As Aitken summarizes, "…fully realized photogénie could only be manifested when its latent power was employed to express the vision of the film-maker, so that the inherent poetry of the cinema could be harnessed, and developed in a revelatory manner by the auteur". However, the narrative avant-garde lacked a theoretical and philosophical base upon which these notions rest and thus the concept of photogénie is always on the edge of an inexplicable mysticism that many critics cannot accept.