French Impressionism can also be referred as the 'first-avant grande' or 'narrative-avant grande'. Most of the impressionist filmmakers started out working for major french companies and some of their works proved financially successful. In Surrealism, the filmmakers relied on their own means and private patronage.
France had been one of the centers of the film industry but they had been traumatize from a serious blow struck by World War 1. French films were unable to compete with the American films on a large scale, their film exports were limited to those countries that had steady cultural exchange. And because of that, a door opened for them to imitate the typical Hollywood films and they thought that it's a way to recapture the market. French films often adapted from theater productions and focuses more on character psychology. The french industry concentrated on finding innovative ways to portray their characters' inner personalities and that is when French Impressionist Cinema movement started.
Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein are those directors who genuinely pushed the boundaries of cinema. They worked part-time and at the same time serving their studios with more conventional work. Impressionist directors were able to expand their movement while still being supported with commercial minded employers. The previous generation considered filmmaking as a commercial graft though the younger filmmakers wrote essays saying that cinema was an art comparable to poetry, painting etc.
Surrealism cinema produced films that are perplexed and shocked most of their audiences. It was more radical movement. We have discussed in our class that Surrealist cinema is overtly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself. Those are silent films and doesn't have dialogue but the visual being shown in the film will definitely attack its viewers.
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