How does this movie's visual images relate to surrealism...anybody know?
shareIsn't it supposed to be Impressionist? I'm not sure though...
shareYes, of course. There's surrealist elements ... I dunno if you ever seen a portrait that moves, but I haven't ... leaves blowing across the floor, books piled high in closets tumbling out on their own. And everything is very dream-like ....
What I'm curious about right now is the music... gotta look into it.
The movie is mostly expressionist with few touches of romanticism and some healthy dosage of surreal. Expressionism dominates though, I think.
And don't confuse expressionism with impressionism :)
Here's a nice definition of expressionism, stolen somewhere:
Art in which the forms arise, not directly from observed reality but from the subjective reactions to reality...in which conventional ideas of realism and proportion seem to have been over-ridden by the artist's emotion, with resultant distortions of shape and colour.
Having no idea about the actual production history, I'm just wondering how much of young Bunuel is behind these surrealist infusions. I'd tend to think that he was just learning the craft at the time, thus the surreal is mostly Epstein's doing.(?)
ggren is right. This is an example of impressionism, not expressionism in the cinema. Cinematic expressionism was a German movement, and got much more popular than impressionism. Jean Epstein was one of the main creators of something called French Impressionist Cinema, and The Fall of... is one of the greatest achievements of that movement. If you would like to know more, I recommend books by David Bordwell or at least a Wiki Page about FIC. Not everything which is old, silent, black and white and deals with horror themes is expressionist.
shareSince Bordwell's books tend to be a little harder to track down/more expensive, I also recommend European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction by Ian Aitken. It has a fairly succinct explanation of Impressionism and how it differs from surrealism.
Still, I have to give credit to people on this thread (especially fripper, who I'm replying to) since I didn't know the difference myself before I read the thread and tracked down Aitken's book.
Give me anything but another year in exile
surrealist at timesWhen there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
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