That would be expressionism you have in mind, or perhaps surrealism aka Dali. Impressionism is about one's "first" or "direct" impression of things as you look at them, not about how you imagine/idealize them later on. Impressionists took this "first impression" business pretty seriously. Your painting most likely would not be called impressionistic if you painted it your studio, from a photograph, or from memory -- you had to do it en plein air (out in the open, from real life).
The idea prevailing at the time (which partly came from the physiology of vision actually) was that, on one's first impression of something, the brain only perceives patches of color (a 2D image), that are only processed after a split second into something more resembling a 3D representation. Impressionists tried to capture that supposedly "pure" first image. Everyone tried to do it in his/her own way. Seurat, for example developed pointillism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jp...).
Most silent films from the era were supposed to run at 18fps (that's why we have a preconception of everything moving fast in silent films--years later they were threaded into sound projectors which sped them up to 24 fps.) BUT many cameras of the day were not motor or spring driven, but run by a hand crank. The cameraman would hum a popular tune at the right tempo and try to turn the crank in time with the beats of the music. This meant that there are subtle faster and slower moments. Also, I noticed a couple of tiny jump cuts where a frame or two may have been lost in the original, also munching with the motion. Finally, not motion related, but the old cameras were not great at exposing every frame exactly, causing a flickering that is very noticeable, and may impact your sense of motion.
If you open the Youtube URL in VLC ("Open network stream") and slow the playback down to 18/24=0.75x, the motion is much more natural throughout the video.
Impressionist doesn't mean abstract. Have you ever stood ~30 feet away from a Monet? It looks just like looking at a regular painting, or better because he really tried to paint to the way your eyes and brain see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism#Impressionist_te...
It's possible that this is not his normal work style, but that the director asked him to move the head a lot to add some action or to conform to some preconception of "what painters normally do".
really? half of the effort in painting is the actual 'seeing', not putting the paint to the canvas. In fact in art school we would do exercises where we drew from life without ever looking at the paper at all
Yes, but normally he might have pointed his easel at the subject and just leaned or looked over the side to see the subject, for example. Although some of his pieces are very large. The point, though, is that you can make looking more dramatic without increasing or decreasing the amount of looking.
