Cousins says that one of the leading directors for French impressionist cinema was Able Gance. One such film he made was ‘Napoléon’ or the offical title, ‘Napoléon vu par Able Gance’ which was a silent film about the French ruler Napoléon Bonaparte. In this film, Gance uses revolutionary filming techniques, such as strapping a camera to the side of a horse while it’s riding into battle, in order to give the audience the feeling that they’re in the action with the characters in the film. This was one of the first times the world saw what’s now known as a Phantom Ride, or at least it’s pretty close to being one.
One of the famous Surreal directors was Salvador Dali, who made films such as ‘Un Chien Andalou’, which was a film with no connecting plot and random cuts to random actions. Such as, in the first minuet of the film, a woman random gets her eye cut open with a razor blade. As well as that, another director was Joseph Cornell.
