France's film industry, so vibrant before The Great War, was decimated by the time the war was winding down. The United States cinema, largely unaffected by the conflict, dominated during the mid- to late 1910s. For a few sophisticated French viewers, who had suffered the pangs of deprivations for four long years, those American films on the surface failed to express the full emotions and feelings of the movies' characters. These works displayed an objective unfolding of stories but without thoroughly examining the personal effects of the plots' events on the people involved. A select company of French filmmakers especially felt film should explore the psychological responses of those in the narrative by creating an entirely new format of illustrations within the frame, something movies was ideal in presenting.
Veteran movie director Abel Gance led the way in this new movement, labeled French Film Impressionism, by his release in November 1918 "The 10th Symphony," produced by the Film d'Art Studio. The groundbreaking feature follows the repercussions of a murder set forth by a hypnotic and evil man, Fred, who persuades his mistress, Eve, to kill his sister. The couple break up, only to find Eve in a new love relationship and marriage to a music composer. Meanwhile Fred coincidentally has his evil web of intrigue wrapped around the composer's daughter, who's passionately in love with Fred. Eve sees what Fred is capable of doing and wants to save the girl from a bleak future with him.
Gance, who also wrote the script, delivers this melodrama in a unique visual presentation, so different than what was seen on the screen before. His opening close-ups of the murder, using Rembrandt Lighting (key lighting with dark backgrounds), mise en scene symbolic images and iris closings set the stage for the aesthetics of remainder of the film.
Cinematographer Léonce-Henri Burelset captures the dreamy interior sets that intentionally serve to explore the inner psych of each character. Fred's evil captivity of Eve is symbolically shown by his hand squeezing a small innocent bird. Close-up images of statues within the rooms explain the motives and universal relationships of the major participants. This layered photographing, alongside the non-linear editing of the unfolding of events, illustrates the methods a writer/director could use to capture the subjectiveness of a story through the eyes of the movie's participants instead of coldly filming the objective plot without these new techniques.
The French Film Impressionism approach of Gance was refined through its popular phase from 1918 to 1929 by Gance himself as well as other adherents. They adopted much of Gance's methods in prioritizing aesthetically beautiful images to convey this sense of emotions, just as the French Impressionistic painters of Monet and Degas created deeper, multi-layered works on their canvasses. This aesthetic is still influential in today's films, especially the more psychological sophisticated ones attempting to look into the inner personalities and motivations of their characters.