Cinema France 1920s

 France in the 1920s

TERMS/PEOPLE

Abel Gance
The first director to depart from established traditions was Abel Gance, who had entered filmmaking in 1911 as a scenarist and then began directing. Aside from making an unreleased Méliès-like fantasy, La Folie du Docteur Tube (“The Madness of Doctor Tube,” 1915), he had worked on commercial projects. 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.  A composer La Dixième Symphonie (Abel Gance, 1918)
La Dixième Symphonie was produced by Charles Pathé, who continued to finance and distribute Gance’s films after the director formed his own production company. This was risky, since some Gance films like J’Accuse and La Roue were lengthy and expensive. Yet Gance was the most popular of the Impressionists. In 1920, an informal poll ranked the public’s favorite films. The only French productions near the top were by Gance 

Germaine Dulac:
Germaine Dulac made some important Impressionist films, including The Smiling Madame Beudet and Gossette (both 1923), but she spent much of her career making more conventional dramas.  She femaleWith the help of her husband and friend she founded a film company and directed a few commercial works before slowly moving into Impressionist and Surrealist territory. She is best known today for her Impressionist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madam Beudet, 1922/23), and her Surrealist experiment, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928). Her career as filmmaker suffered after the introduction of sound film and she spent the last decade of her life working on newsreels for Pathé and Gaumont.

Henri Diamant-Berger
French filmmakers were unaccustomed to using artificial lighting extensively. As director Henri Diamant-Berger observed in early 1918, “Lighting effects are sought and achieved in America by the addition of strong light sources, and not, as in France, by the suppression of other sources. In America, lighting effects are created; in France, shadow effects are created.” Good lighting show in three muskeetrs – diamant berger For the epic The Three Musketeers (1921–1922), Henri Diamant-Berger installed American-style overhead lighting in a studio at Vincennes. Modern lighting technology became increasingly available during the 1920s, but it remained too expensive for widespread use. Some French serials of the postwar era followed the established pattern, with cliffhanger endings, master criminals, and exotic locales. Diamant-Berger’s fourteen-episode adaptation of The Three Musketeers was among the decade’s most successful films.

Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein, who was to make some of the most experimental of the Impressionist films, began with a quasi-documentary, Pasteur (1923), for Pathé. During the making of Coeur fidèle Epstein chose to film a simple story of love and violence "to win the confidence of those, still so numerous, who believe that only the lowest melodrama can interest the public", and also in the hope of creating "a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence of tragedy" Wikipedia

Léon Moussinac
In 1925, Léon Moussinac, a leftist critic sympathetic to the Impressionists,
  published La Naissance du Cinéma (“The Birth of the Cinema”);
6)there he summed up the movement’s stylistic traits and the theoretical views of its
   filmmakers.
7)Largely based on Delluc’s writings,
8)Moussinac’s account stressed
   a)expressive techniques like
   b)slow motion and
   c)superimpositions,
9) and it singled out the Impressionist group as the most interesting French filmmakers.

Marcel L’Herbier Herbier
It invested some of the profits in a group of films by Marcel L’Herbier, whose debut work, Rose-France, was the second Impressionist film. Still, L’Herbier made two more Impressionist films, L’Homme du Large and El Dorado, for Gaumont, and by 1920 critics began to notice that France had a cinematic avant-garde.

Max Linder
Comedies continued to be popular after the war. Max Linder, who had been lured briefly to Hollywood, returned to make comedies in France, including one of the earliest comic features, Le Petit Café (1919, Raymond Bernard). Linder plays a waiter who inherits a large sum of money but must go on working to fulfill his contract; comic scenes follow as he tries to get himself fired.
professionally as Max Linder as a French actor, director, screenwriter, producer and comedian of the silent film era. His onscreen persona "Max" was one of the first recognizable recurring characters in film. 

La Naissance du Cinéma
In 1925, Léon Moussinac, a leftist critic sympathetic to the Impressionists, published La Naissance du Cinéma (“The Birth of the Cinema”); 6)there he summed up the movement’s stylistic traits and the theoretical views of its filmmakers.

Photogénie
In trying to define the nature of the film image, the Impressionists often referred to the concept of photogenie photogenic photogénie, a term that indicates something more than being “photogenic.” For them, photogénie was the basis of cinema. Louis Delluc popularized the term around 1918, using it to define that quality that distinguishes a film shot from the original object photographed. The process of filming, according to Delluc, lends an object a new expressiveness by giving the viewer a fresh perception of it.

René Clair
A modest genre was the fantasy film, and its most prominent practitioner was Rene Clair René Clair. His first film, Paris qui dort (“Sleeping Paris,” AKA The Crazy Ray, 1924), was a comic story of a mysterious ray that paralyzes Paris. Clair used freeze-frame techniques and unmoving actors to create the sense of an immobile city. The Crazy Ray (René Clair, 1924)

In Clair’s Le Voyage Imaginaire (“The Imaginary Journey,” 1926), the hero dreams that he is transported by a witch to a fairyland, created with fancifully painted sets. Such fantasies revived a popular tradition of the early cinema in France, drawing on camera tricks and stylized sets 

FILMS

Coeur Fidèle

The Crazy Ray

La Dixième Symphonie

El Dorado

The Imaginary Journey

L’Inhumaine

Napoléon

Le Petit Café

Rose-France

La Roue

The Smiling Madame Beudet

The Three Musketeers