The first article we chose is called The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema by Federico Pierotti, available on JStor. We reviewed chapter 10: Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s, which discusses how French film has origins in advertising styles developed post World War 1. The intended audience for the source is an international level of professors and students studying Film history.
The article provides an in-depth discussion on the similar origins of post World War 1 advertising and cinema in France as well as how avant-garde filmmakers strived to destabilise the position of the ‘motionless spectator’ and providing examples. Since the author is a part of a university, it is confirmed that his articles are of a scholarly nature and since he primarily teaches Film History and Forms of Contemporary Cinema, he has a strong background as a film scholar. The source was published in 2018, making it a fairly up to date source as it uses information that is up to date within the last decade.
The following quote can help us understand the style of this week’s screenings by giving insight into the artistic vision of the directors. “The embodied spectator…While, unlike most advertisements, the cinematic medium showed moving strategies to destabilize this position, which was considered to be one of the basic conditions of the illusion of reality.” In sum, the cinematic medium of the time seemed to warp reality so that it became subjective and subtly reflect the thoughts or the power of the characters on scene rather than view the action from an objective viewpoint.
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The second source we chose focuses on French Impressionism rather than film but still helps us to view the key questions from the seminar. This is a book titled ‘The Great Book of French Impressionism’ published in 1997, its author is Diane Kelder who has written many other books on art in relation to art history and theory including french impressionism but ranging across a variety of cultures. It is a volume from Abbeville Press and covers the most important impressionist artists, such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec along with some post-Impressionists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne. It is well-written and goes into enough detail for the general reader.
Kelder is an art history professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. The author is a professional in her field with a long history of published works. Her work is for students and professors as well as the general public interested in studying French Impressionism. While it isn’t a university-published book (published by the Abbeville Press), its publishers are still professional news publishers and are aware of the rules and regulations around plagiarism. We can use this text to study how French culture has influenced film and how classical artists and art movements like French Impressionism have impacted the development of French film in the 1920s.
Bibliography
Source 1: The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema by Federico Pierotti, Chapter 10
Quote from page 205
Source 2: The great book of french impressionism Diane Kelder
https://www.abbeville.com/books/the-great-book-of-french-impressionism-by-diane-kelder-494-b
This is a largely impressive blog post that demonstrates initiative, research and cognisance of the key themes of this week’s classes. You engage with the texts in question, outline their central arguments and link their aims to our own investigations into French cinema of the 1920s.
I like how you have taken time to research the academic output of both writers and to illustrate what this can tell us about both their likely goals and their intended audiences. Your quotation from Pierotti helps to crystallise this further, but do remember to put a page number in parentheses after such quotes.
Your point about the Abbeville Press is well made. The other book is published bu University of Amsterdam Press incidentally, which is one of the better UPs in Europe.
A couple of things.
Pierotti’s text is indeed a chapter, but it is also worth pointing out that it forms part of an edited collection. Kelder’s text menwhile is a monograph.
Citation of both should adhere to MLA criteria. This differs depending on what you are citing (see link on ELE), but in the case of Kelder it would be:
Kelder, Diane. The Great Book of French Impressionism. New York: Abbeville Press, 1980.
A screen grab or photo of the title pages of the texts in question would bring even more life to the blog post.