@article{Trembling:4886,
      recid = {4886},
      author = {Zhang, Menghan},
      title = {Trembling of the Veil: The Formation of Cinéma de l’esprit  in France},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {240},
      abstract = {This dissertation offers a re-examination and reassessment  of the French silent film movement that is commonly  referred to as “French Impressionism” through a  contextualized study of the formation of its theoretical  discourse in the early twentieth century. I rename the  movement cinéma de l’esprit and argue that it was driven by  a hitherto ignored and misunderstood utopian aspiration to  make cinema an instrument of spiritual revelation and a  surrogate for religion. By reconceptualizing the movement’s  discursive formation from both a diachronic and a  synchronic perspective, this dissertation makes a  historiographical as well as a theoretical intervention in  the study of French silent cinema and the debate around  classical film theory. This dissertation aims to integrate  cinéma de l’esprit into the Romantic-Symbolist tradition of  revelationism, which sees art as the agent for renewing  perception, preserving spiritual meaning, and bringing  about social change. It also immerses the movement in the  broader intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century,  where key concepts which undergird the articulation of film  theory were being forged in an open, hybrid, and productive  interdisciplinary atmosphere of exchange and translation,  in order to reconstruct the model of the subject operating  in the movement’s theoretical discourse.            Chapter  One conceptualizes the influence of Symbolism on cinéma de  l’esprit as the inheritance of an anti-Enlightenment  worldview. Chapter Two discusses the translation of that  worldview into a revelationist theory of cinema formed in  the Romantic-Symbolist tradition that saw art as an  instrument of ecstasy. Cinéma de l’esprit revitalized the  notion of revelation by positioning cinema as an art of the  crowd. Chapter Three sets up the parameters for the  fin-de-siècle intellectual milieu in France that enabled a  new articulation of the subject by looking into the  intersections of science, para-science, and the occult.  Chapter Four tackles the incommunicability of ecstasy as a  problem for Symbolist aesthetics and considers the  theoretical positions of cinéma de l’esprit in light of its  contemporary theories about the unconscious and the human  sensorium. Cinéma de l’esprit considered its medium  uniquely revelatory because it offered an embodied and  unmediated path to ecstatic experience. Ultimately, I argue  that cinéma de l’esprit should be considered part of the  greater modernist aspiration to re-enchant modernity. 

},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4886},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4886},
}