Cinéma pur

The term was first coined by Henri Chomette. The goal of the movement was to create a cinema that focused on the pure elements of film like motion, visual composition, and rhythm. It was begun by European filmmakers René Clair, Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and others. They sought to accomplish their goal by minimizing story and plot, focusing instead on visual concerns by using close-ups, dolly shots, montage, lens distortions, and other cinematic techniques. Films like Ballet Mécanique, Symphony Diagonale, and The Symphony of a Great City projected rhythm and motion in the title of the films and the works themselves. In addition to close-ups, other filmmaking techniques were used to create rhythm and visual interest. They include fast and slow motion, trick shots, stop-action cinematography and dynamic cutting.


The clearest examples of pure cinema are said by essayist and filmmaker Hubert Revol to be documentaries.


Documentary must be made by poets. Few of those within French cinema have understood that in our country, we possess innumerable elements and subjects to make, not just insignificant ribbons, but splendid films lively and expressive... The purest demonstration of pure cinema, that is to say of poetry which is truly cinematographic, has been provided us by some remarkable films, vulgarly called documentaries, particularly Nanook and Moana.


The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to transcend 'story', to ridicule 'character,' 'setting,' and 'plot' as bourgeois conventions, to slaughter causality by using the innate dynamism of the film medium to overturn conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space. The movement also encompasses the work of the feminist critic/filmmaker Germaine Dulac, particularly Thème et variations, Disque 957, and Cinegraphic Study of an Arabesque. In these as well as in her theoretical writing, Dulac's goal was 'pure' cinema, free from any influence from literature, the stage, or even the other visual arts.


It declares cinema to be its own independent art form that should not borrow from literature or stage. As such, 'pure cinema' is made up of nonstory, noncharacter films that convey abstract emotional experiences through unique cinematic devices such as montage, camera movement and camera angles, sound-visual relationships, super-impositions and other optical effects, and visual composition.


Critics and artists used terms such as Absolute Film, Pure Cinema, and Integral Cinema Dulac's term which might better be translated 'Self-Sufficient' or 'Complete' cinema to stress that these works, all of them, functioned only as cinema art: that they could not exist in any other medium because their essential effect arose from the unique potentials of the cinematic mechanism, such as flexible montage of time and space, measured pacing and control of gaze, exact repetition, single-frame diversity and continuity, superimposition and its related split-screen imagery.


Cinéma Pur, a 1920s and 1930s French avant-garde film movement also influenced the development of the idea of 'art film.' The cinema pur film movement included Dada artists, such as Man Ray, René Clair, and Marcel Duchamp. The Dadaists used film to transcend narrative conventions, bourgeois traditions, and conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space by creating a flexible montage of time and space.


Chomette adjusts the film speed and shoots from different angles to capture abstract patterns in his 1925 film Jeux des reflets de la vitesse. His film made the following year, Cinq minutes du cinéma pur reflected a more minimal, formal style. Germaine Dulac's goal of 'pure cinema' and some of her works inspired the French Cinema pur film movement. Theme et varitions and Disque, both made in 1928, are two examples of cinéma pur by Dulac.


Video Empire produces videos read aloud. Use the information in this video at your own risk. We cannot always guarantee accuracy.

This video uses material from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinéma_pur, licensed with CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. This video is licensed with CC Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... In order to adapt this content it is required to comply with the license terms. Image licensing information is available via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinéma_pur