Impressions de France
| Impressions de France | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | World Showcase |
| Type | Film |
| Opened | October 1, 1982 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
Impressions de France is a panoramic film in the France Pavilion in World Showcase at EPCOT in Walt Disney World, Florida. Shown in the pavilion's Palais du Cinéma theatre, it has played since the park's opening day and is the only opening-day World Showcase film still screened in substantially its original form. Rather than telling a story, the film offers a travelling portrait of France itself, moving between countryside, coast, historic towns and Paris, carried almost entirely by its classical music score.
History
The film opened with the France pavilion and the rest of EPCOT on October 1, 1982.[1] It was directed by Rick Harper, who also researched and selected much of its music, and was written and produced with Bob Rogers, a filmmaker who became closely associated with large-format pavilion films.[2]
Where most pavilion films of the period relied on narration to explain what guests were seeing, Harper's film was planned from the start as a primarily visual and musical experience. A small amount of narration, spoken by Claude Gobet, links the sequences, but long passages play with no commentary at all. That restraint, together with the age of the footage, is a large part of why the film has dated differently from its contemporaries: fashions and cars have changed, but fields, cathedrals, mountains and market towns have changed far less.
The film's longevity was tested in 2020. On January 17 that year the Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along opened in the same theatre, and the two productions began sharing the Palais du Cinéma, with the sing-along taking most daytime hours and Impressions de France screening mainly in the evening. At the same time the older film was upgraded to a sharper digital presentation, allowing it to continue alongside its newer neighbour rather than being replaced by it.
Experience
Guests are seated — unusually comfortable seating for a pavilion film — facing five adjoining screens that wrap the picture across a wide arc of about 200 degrees, filling normal peripheral vision without requiring guests to stand or turn around as Circle-Vision does.[3] The theatre holds roughly 350 guests, and the running time is about 18 minutes.
The journey ranges widely. It takes in the cliffs of Normandy and the harbour at La Rochelle, vineyards and châteaux in the Loire Valley including Chambord and Chaumont, the village streets of the Dordogne, skiers in the French Alps around Chamonix and Mont Blanc, and the Riviera coast, before finishing in Paris with the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées and the Eiffel Tower. In total the film visits more than forty locations. Between the grand views are smaller human moments — cyclists on a country road, hot-air balloons rising over a château, market traders and wedding guests — that keep the film from reading as a simple catalogue of landmarks.
Music
The score is the film's defining feature. Disney composer Buddy Baker arranged and conducted a programme of French classical music, keeping the selections Harper had chosen and re-orchestrating them so that one piece flows into the next, with original bridging material where the existing repertoire left gaps.[4] The composers drawn on span roughly two centuries and include Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Maurice Ravel, Jacques Offenbach, François-Adrien Boieldieu, Paul Dukas and Erik Satie.[5]
Individual pieces are matched closely to the pictures: Saint-Saëns' "Aquarium" accompanies the opening coastal scenes, Debussy's "Clair de lune" and flute writing recur in quieter passages, and the finale of Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony builds under the closing Paris sequence. The result is often described by admirers as less a travelogue with music than a concert with pictures, and the score has remained a favourite on EPCOT soundtrack albums long after many contemporary pavilion scores were forgotten.
See also
References
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressions_de_France
- ↑ https://themickeywiki.com/index.php?title=Impressions_de_France&oldid=12160
- ↑ https://allears.net/2015/11/09/the-music-of-impressions-de-france/
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressions_de_France
- ↑ https://allears.net/2015/11/09/the-music-of-impressions-de-france/