Introduction - style in cinema

This number of Style assembles six essays on style in cinema. The authors discuss parallels between literary style and film style, ways in which technology (sound, color) shapes technique, the problem of cinematic tempo, the ethics of style, and the connections between style and form within a single film. The films discussed include His Girl Friday, Meet Me in St. Louis, Le Corbeau, Lone Star, and Sunset Blvd. These probing and subtle pieces show how rich this vein of inquiry can be. They provide a powerful indication that style is once more on the film scholar's agenda.

I say "once more," because seventy years ago film aesthetics was largely coterminous with matters of style,(1) During the great age of silent film theory, such trends as German Expressionism and Soviet Montage were discussed principally as stylistic phenomena. As filmmakers and thinkers began to probe the aesthetic possibilities of cinema, it was natural to think in terms of art-historical categories such as national styles (open-air lyricism for the Swedes, mechanistic dynamism for the Soviets) and personal styles (the differences between Pudovkin and Eisenstein, or Lubitsch and Lang). Russian Formalist literary critics and Prague School semioticians tried to discern the forms and codes of cinema in techniques of cutting, camera position, and lighting. Many silent-film commentators were sharp-eyed stylisticians. It is startling to open a little book like Timoshenko's 1926 The Art of the Cinema: The Montage of Films and find detailed shot-by-shot analyses of passages from American crime movies.

The arrival of sound-on-film may have dampened inquiry into style somewhat, partly as a result of 1930s social-command aesthetics in the USSR, Europe, and the US, partly because international cinema became more stylistically homogeneous. Still, there were many important theoretical initiatives, most notably the writings of Eisenstein and Andre Bazin. And after the war, as avant-gardes multiplied and auteur cinema swept the world, another great age of stylistic theory and criticism emerged. Cinema, it seemed, was being remade month by month. In Voyage to Italy and Hiroshima mon amour and Pierrot le fou, in Seven Samurai and Pickpocket, in Shadows and Anticipation of the Night, in L'Avventura and Persona and Gertrud and The Birds and Play Time (not to mention The Ladies' Man), viewers found themselves facing new conceptions of what movies could be and do. The best critics - Andrew Sarris, V. F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat, Raymond Bellour, P. Adams Sitney, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Noel Burch - rose to the occasion with essays sensitive to the challenges posed by the films.(2) Many writers also sought to build more general theories of film style, as outlined in studies like Bellour's "Pour une stylistique du cinema," Burch's Theory of Film Practice, Ropars-Wuilleumier's De la litterature au cinema, and Perkins's Film as Film.

By the 1970s, film studies began to take root in colleges and universities, and schools of "new stylistics" emerged. Scholars around New York University cultivated a quasi-phenomenological "thick description" indebted to conceptions of modernism, reflexivity, and the material texture of the medium.(3) At the University of Wisconsin - Madison, a trend influenced by Slavic formalism elaborated a comparative approach to style, concentrating on defining group styles such as the Hollywood tradition and studying how directors varied or transformed them.(4) Several doctoral programs sustained research into early cinema, a major testing ground for competing accounts of the "history of film language."(5)

For many, however, inquiry into style was losing its lustre. As film studies integrated itself into the modern liberal arts, it allied itself not with departments of art history or music history, but with departments of literature. Falling into step with dominant tendencies in literary studies, film studies became a largely hermeneutic discipline. "Readings," usually "symptomatic" ones, were the order of the day, and style was usually ignored, at best demoted to a matter of a one-off moment (chiefly some character's look, or Look) that could bear the weight of thematic baggage, whether psychoanalytic, Marxist, or post-structuralist.(6) It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years most film scholars have paid virtually no attention to matters of style. Whereas a musicologist's education starts with a grounding in period style and compositional technique, many professors of film have no interest in studying the norms of camerawork, editing, or sound. (Perhaps this situation mirrors the state of literature departments; is prosody considered a cutting-edge area?)

Yet after a couple of decades of recession, stylistics has returned to prominence.(7) Scholars have begun to treat style as not only a vehicle for thematic meaning but a broader strategy for shaping perceptual uptake, organizing the film's internal dynamic, or arousing emotion. Some cognitive theorists have connected style to audience response; if we do not yet have a tradition of "affective stylistics," we are pulling together an account of what a psychological theory of style might look like.(8) And like our colleagues in art history and musicology, we have begun to ask how we might explain style historically. Do we look to social context, culture, the pressures of modernity or postmodernity? Or do we look more narrowly to those pertinent and proximate institutions that shape the norms governing filmmakers' conduct? What, for example, is the role of craft tradition in promoting style? Such debates have been played out, once again, in studies of early cinema, and the results have been robust.

While hermeneutic criticism of a culturalist stripe continues to dominate film studies, it is important to remember that we are still largely ignorant of how style helps define a film's particularity, engage us in its imaginative world, and demonstrate the creative reach of the medium. And the filmmakers will not wait for us: such recent masterpieces as Hou Hsiao-Hsien's City of Sadness (1989), Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991), Kitano Takeshi's Sonatine (1993), and Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees (1994) all remind us that style is central to the ways movies work. So do the essays that follow.

Notes

1 Many of the developments sketched below are discussed in more detail in my On the History of Film Style.

2 I discuss one example of this activity in "Sarris and the Search for Style."

3 A representative sampling can be found in "Eisenstein/Brakhage," Artforum.

4 See for example Edward Branigan's "The Space of Equinox Flower" and Kristin Thompson's Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible": A Neoformalist Analysis.

5 Important studies of early film can be found in Holman,Cinema 1900-1906, and in Elsaesser,Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative.

6 I've tried to develop a history and analysis of this state of affairs in Making Meaning.

7 Some examples are Gunning's D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film; Tsivian's "Two Stylists of the Teens"; Davis's Picturing Japaneseness; Brewster and Jacobs's Theatre to Cinema; and the essays collected in Martin's Film - Matters of Style.

8 See for example Anderson's The Reality of Illusion and Carroll's "Film, Attention, and Communication."

Works Cited

Anderson, Joseph D. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.

Bellour, Raymond. "Pour une stylistique du film." Revue d'esthetique 19.2 (April-June 1966): 161-78.

Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

-----. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

-----. "Sarris and the Search for Style." Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic: A Tribute to Andrew Sarris. Ed. Emmanuel Levy. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, forthcoming.

Branigan, Edward. "The Space of Equinox Flower." Screen 17.2 (Summer 1976): 74-105.

Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

Burch, Noel. Theory of Film Practice. 1969. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Carroll, Noel. "Film, Attention, and Communication." The Great Ideas Today 1996. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.2-49.

Davis, Darrell William. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

"Eisenstein/Brakhage." Special number of Artforum 11.5 (January 1973).

Elsaesser, Thomas, ed. Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 1990.

Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Holman, Roger, ed. Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytical Study by the National Film Archive (London) and the International Federation of Film Archives. Brussels: FIAF, 1982.

Martin, Adrian, ed. Film - Matters of Style. Special number of Continuum 5.2 (1992).

Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, M. C. De la litterature au cinema. Paris: Colin, 1970.

Thompson, Kristin. Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible": A Neoformalist Analysis. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

Timoshenko, S. Iskusstvo kino: Montazh-fil'ma (The Art of the Cinema: The Montage of Films). Leningrad: Academia, 1926.

Tsivian, Yuri. "Two Stylists of the Teens: Franz Hofer and Yevgenii Bauer." A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996. 264-76.

David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written several books on film history and aesthetics, most recently On the History of Film Style (Harvard UP, 1997). He is currently completing a book on Hong Kong cinema.

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