[3] Based on David Bordwell's family resemblance model:[4] However, even Marcel L’Herbier, one of the chief filmmakers associated with the movement, admitted to an ununified theoretical stance: "None of us – Dulac, Epstein, Delluc or myself – had the same aesthetic outlook.
Much of it is an extension of Symbolist poetics that posit a realm beyond matter and our immediate sense experience that art and the artist attempt to reveal and express.
Using strange and imaginative effects, it altered traditional views and aimed to question the norm of the film industry at the time.
As Aitken summarizes, "…fully realized photogénie could only be manifested when its latent power was employed to express the vision of the film-maker, so that the inherent poetry of the cinema could be harnessed, and developed in a revelatory manner by the auteur".
[8] However, the narrative avant-garde lacked a theoretical and philosophical base upon which these notions rest and thus the concept of photogénie is always on the edge of an inexplicable mysticism that many critics cannot accept.