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.