Of the three European movements that overlapped during the 1920s, French Impressionism lasted the longest, from 1918 to early 1929. Late in the decade, several factors contributed to its decline. As the movement became better established, the interests of its filmmakers became more diverse. In addition, significant changes within the French film industry made it more difficult for some of them to retain control over their own work.
The Filmmakers Go Their Own Ways
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 alternative, 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.
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.”4 Indeed, Epstein increasingly presented simple stories in a quasi-documentary style, using nonactors and eliminating flashy Impressionist camerawork 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 Menilmontant and the four films produced by Les Films Jean Epstein.
Another factor diversifying the Impressionist movement was the impact of experimental films. As we shall see in Chapter 8, 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, The Seashell and the Clergyman. Thereafter she concentrated on abstract short films.
Problems within the Film Industry
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.
Moreover, by the late 1920s, the large distribution firms were less interested in financing Impressionist films. In the first years of the movement, as we have seen, there had been some hope that these distinctive films might be competitive in the United States and Germany. Only a few Impressionist films, however, were exported to these markets, and even fewer met with success. The experiments of the late 1920s were hardly calculated to make these films more competitive, either at home or abroad.
Ironically, by 1926 the French economy as a whole was doing better than at any point since the war’s end. Inflation was finally curbed in that year. From 1926 to the end of the decade, France experienced the same boom period that most other countries were enjoying. By the late 1920s, the film industry was showing some signs of strength. Several of the larger production firms merged during 1929 to form two major companies: Pathe, Natan, and Cineromans merged into Pathe-Natan, and another combination of three firms created Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert. (As we shall see in Chapter 13, the strength of the French film industry was largely illusory and definitely transitory.)
The Impressionists fared badly during the late 1920s, with most losing their independent companies. In 1928 Cineromans absorbed UHerbier’s Cinegraphic, reediting his expensive production, L'Argent. L'Herbier quit, but he was forced into more commercial projects in the sound era. That same year, Les Films Jean Epstein went out of business, though Epstein obtained independent backing for his modest non-Impressionist films. The tangled production history and huge budget of Napoleon made it impossible for Gance to remain independent; thereafter he was strictly supervised by his backers, and his subsequent films contain, at best, a shadow of his earlier experimentation.
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. It 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.5
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. As we shall see in Chapter 5, 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 (see p. 170), 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.
World History
