Literature, Theater and Photography
Gaumont wrote to Feuillade and stated that 2 films were “marvelous in their action, their photography, but unshowable in the American market.” Which two films were they?
What is: “The Iron Worker’s Daughter” and “The Piano Mistress”
What is the term used to refer to the new postwar directors who replaced those who left France or retired from filmmaking after World War I?
Who are the impressionists?
What word did critic Louis Delluc invent to describe quality of photographic or cinematographic images?
What is: Photogénic
The French film industry depended heavily on?
What is: Exports
Where was Melies Manufacturing Company first located in the United States?
What is: Fort Lee, New Jersey
René Clair analyzed that Abel Gance should’ve been “willing to give up literature and place his trust in cinema!”. What did literature symbolize and what did cinema symbolize?
What is: “Thinking” (literature) and “Feeling” (cinema)
Who was the filmmaker who is often said to have invented film criticism and was at the center of the alternative film culture of the 1920s?
Who is Louis Dulluc?
In what year did Edison create the Motion Picture Patents Company?
What is: 1908
Relations between film production and the rest of the industry were, in a word, _?
What is: adversarial
What event drove the French Film industry into its first major hardship
What is: World War I
“Napoléon” was one of Gance’s most conventional and “safe” silent works. Why did Gance’s backers put enormous sums of money into the production?
What is: They knew that well-made historical epics had excellent box office prospects both in the French market and abroad.
Which of the most prominent prewar directors left for America after the war?
Who are Max Linder and Leonce Perret?
This film is well known today for its “anamorphically” distorted images
What is: La Folie Du Docteur Tube (The insanity of Doctor Tube)
Pathe Freres inaugurated their American production in 1910 with what film? This film was filmed in the wilds of deepest New Jersey.
What is: The Girl From Arizona
The French began to loosen its grip on the American Market due to what disastrous occurrence to Eclair American?
What is: A studio fire in 1914
Louis Delluc wrote for and eventually became managing editor of which glossy weekly magazine covering the arts and life in Paris?
What is: “Comoedia Illustré”
Which of the most prominent prewar directors stayed in France after the war?
Who are Louis Feuillade, Henri Fescourt, and Henri Pouctal?
This director developed the first “triple screen images” to produce what we know today as a Panorama
Who is: Abel Gance
Colette, a distinguished writer known for her critiques on films, reviewed this film explicitly in terms of what she saw as the contemporary French cinema’s failings
What is: Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat (1915), known in France as Forfaiture
For the independently produced four-reel picture, La Reine Elizabeth, Adolph Zukor paid how much for the rights to this film?
What is: $35,000
Who’s film look had a new and unusual, highly visible cinematographic style? Also referred to as du lusque or “luggsury”.
Who is: Cecil B. De Mille
What famous film did Abel Gance have to travel to London in order to see, making him one of the very few Frenchmen who saw it before its Paris release in the 1920s?
What is The Birth of a Nation?
An underlying theme in many new filmmakers work in the post-war period
What is: Poor Health
Abel Gance’s last three silent films
What is: J’Accuse (I Accuse) 1919, La Roue (The Wheel) 1922, Napoleon vu par Abel Gance (Napoleon, as seen by Abel Gance) 1927
Which two major powers of French cinema were vertically integrated, combining production, distribution, and exhibition?
What are: Pathé and Gaumont