By August, 1914 France was going to war. When general mobilization orders for WWI were announced, the French film industry was already retreating from the American cinematic establishment. Large companies were no longer able to produce films in the number or... [more]

By August, 1914 France was going to war. When general mobilization orders for WWI were announced, the French film industry was already retreating from the American cinematic establishment. Large companies were no longer able to produce films in the number or scale that had previously been achieved. A vacuum of sorts opened up which was filled by smaller, independent companies that were often more willing to experiment artistically and risk innovative methods and tactics. Due to financial pressures, subject matter shifted from large-budget super productions to smaller projects that were often simply adaptations of pre-war boulevard theater. These 'boulevard melodramas' were generally devoted to women's stories, because of the number of women in the cinema audience. They also addressed the ideological significance of the home-front during the war. Unlike traditional big budget productions, which often incorporated several reels and focused on heroic, historic, or comedic subjects, these melodramas were shorter and had a strong psychological focus. Out of this focus on inner life came many of the most advanced strategies of representation and narration yet seen in French film, including extraordinary lighting, framing, and editing techniques. The boulevard melodrama continued to evolve through the 1910s and into the '20s, when the experiments of such avant-garde filmmakers as Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein, and Germaine Dulac created Impressionist film. As with Impressionism in painting, Impressionist film created a rougher image, forcing the audience to participate by themselves putting various parts together into a whole. As the painters had used color, the filmmakers used sequences of brief, seemingly unrelated and often elliptical shot sequences. They experimented with different forms of rhythmic montage, and used associational editing which juxtaposed, and therefore linked, these unrelated shots. [show less]