Falubert's use of cinematic detail

Before Flaubert no author was as attentive to the details of time and place - every reader sees right away how it is essential to Flaubert's style and purpose to depict a scene with a super-abundance of detailed observations. Today, we would call his style cinematic - but of course he anticipated cinema by at leas 50 years. the famous scenes in the first section of Madame Bovary include the dress ball that Emma and Charles attend, the wedding banquet, the arrival at Charles's house in the village of Toste, Emma's days in the convent (one of the few flashbacks or back story passages in the entire novel - everything else taking place in the immediate present), the first depiction of the country farm when Emma is living with her father. Flaubert's capacity for description is remarkable and incomparable to any author other than Proust not only for his copious detail - piling on facts and names, in contemporary fiction, is a tic and an annoyance; viz. The Children's Book for just one example of accumulated detail to no effect - because he does not simply add name upon name and fact upon fact, but each detail (or almost each, out of the thousands) is telling and meaningful. Think of Emma entering the ballroom - the detailed descriptions of what everyone's wearing, the way the women are doing their hair, the type of jewelry, and so on - all is important because we are in Emma's mind (without Flaubert's saying so) and everything she sees opens a world to her that she believes she deserves and that she know she never will have. So Flaubert is not just providing a wealth of information just so that we will "be there" or so that we will know what life was like in provincial France, thought those are ancillary benefits, but so as to build our understanding of Emma's character and of her (eventual) interaction with Charles and his mother and with the other men whom she will meet over the course of her troubled life. Similarly with the convent scene - it helps us understand Emma, her initial passion for the church, but not for the teachings or of the asceticism, but for the almost sensuous nature of prayer - the leafs of the prayerbook lifting slightly in the breeze, for example - so that her eventual straying from the church and disappointing those who expected her to enter the novitiate (if that's the right term?) feel obvious and inevitable. She has no vocation other than her own sensibilities.