French Impressionism

In the years after the First World War, a group of French filmmakers set out to make cinema an art of feeling and perception. Louis Delluc, who coined the word photogénie, argued for it; Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein and Marcel L'Herbier made it. They used superimposition, soft focus, slow motion and fast, rhythmic editing to show what characters felt and remembered, not just what they did. Gance's Napoléon pushed this furthest, with a triple-screen finale. Dulac and Epstein turned the camera toward dreams, the sea and the inner life, while Clair's Entr'acte took the same energy into pure play. Sound arrived around 1929 and the movement faded, but its ideas lived on.

Where

France, mostly Paris

When

About 1918 to 1930, the silent years

Key figures

Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Feyder, René Clair

Landmark films

J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), Entr'acte (1924), Napoléon (1927), The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

Legacy

Showed that film could express thought and emotion through the image alone, and fed into later avant-garde and surrealist cinema

What to look for

• Superimposition, soft focus and slow motion used to show feelings and memories
• Fast, rhythmic editing built like music
• Close-ups of faces, objects and the sea, chasing photogénie