Film d'Art
Film d'Art (French for: art film ) was a movement in French film in the early 1910s that aimed to counteract the bad reputation of the film medium by introducing elements from theater and literature .
history
In 1908 the brothers Paul and Léon Laffitte and the actors André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy founded the film production company Le Film d'Art , which was to give the movement its name. They wanted to take the nimbus of undemanding mass entertainment away from the film and produce high-quality, artistically demanding films. For this purpose u. a. Staged plays for the film performed by well-known actors from the Comédie-Française . Literary material was selected as a template and commissioned as a script from respected writers such as Anatole France and Edmond Rostand .
Recognized theater directors took care of the productions, and composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns or his American colleague Joseph Carl Breil , who can be regarded as one of the first pronounced film composers , provided the background music . Well-known theater actors such as Sarah Bernhardt , Gabrielle Réjane and Jean Mounet-Sully appeared in these films. The first major production of the Film d'Art was The Assassination of the Duke of Guise by Paul Lavedan in 1908 , directed by Calmettes and Le Bargy and loaned by Pathé . In 1912 Queen Elisabeth followed under the direction of Louis Mercanton with Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role and Albert Capellani's Die Elenden after Victor Hugo . In Germany, authors such as Gerhart Hauptmann wrote for the 1913 film Atlantis . The movement, which includes Abel Gance's early works , came to an end around 1920.
effect
The staging of the films was essentially limited to filming a theater action with a static camera. The Film d'Art did not find much interest among the viewers, who preferred to use real-life subjects. The plan to attract an upper-class and educated audience to the cinema failed.
However, one of the successes of the Film d'Art is that the market has become more open for longer and more elaborately produced feature films. In addition, the role of the actor as an essential vehicle for cinematic art was upgraded. The Film d'Art had a lasting effect, especially abroad: Paul Davidson founded the Projektions-AG Union (PAGU) in Germany , which pursued similar goals and brought theater artists like Max Reinhardt and actresses like Asta Nielsen to film. Adolph Zukor , the American distributor of Queen Elizabeth, founded the Famous Players in Famous Plays Company, later Paramount , another film company based on a similar concept.
literature
- Sabine Lenk: Théâtre contre Cinéma. The discussion about cinema and theater in France before the First World War . Münster: MakS Publications 1989.
Individual evidence
- ^ Le Film d'Art in the Internet Movie Database
- ↑ a b Sabine Lenk: Art Cinema: Film d'Art. In: Lexicon of film terms. Hans J. Wulff and Theo Bender, accessed April 10, 2015 . Last changed on January 13, 2012. ISSN 1610-420X .
- ^ Hans J. Wulff: Film d'Art. In: Lexicon of film terms. Hans J. Wulff and Theo Bender, accessed April 10, 2015 . Last changed on August 1, 2011. ISSN 1610-420X .