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intuitions stem from style. However unaware spectators may be of it, style is working at every moment to shape their experience.
From a filmmaker’s perspective, images and sounds constitute the medium in and through which the film achieves its emotional and intellectual impact. The organization of this material—how a shot is staged and composed, how the images are cut together, how music reinforces the action—can hardly be a matter of indifference. Style is not simply a fetching fabric draped over a script; it is the very flesh of the work. No wonder that rich craft traditions have grown up to guide filmmakers in choosing technical means that best serve stylistic ends. By centering our inquiry on film style, we’re trying to come to grips with aspects of cinema that matter very much to how films work. No adequate theory of film as a medium can neglect the shaping role of style.
In certain respects, the images and sounds that filmmakers have created vary across times and places; in other respects, they’re stable. This state of affairs opens up anew realm of questions. How and why do some stylistic factors vary? How and why do others stabilize? And what are the implications for the ways in which filmmakers and audiences have conceived of how movies might work? There are no more important and more exciting problems for film scholars to tackle.
Indeed, stylistic history is one of the strongest justifications for film studies as a distinct academic discipline. If studying film is centrally concerned with “reading” movies in the manner of literary texts, any humanities scholar armed with a battery of familiar interpretive strategies could probably do as well as anyone trained in film analysis. This is especially true as hermeneutic practices across the humanities have come to converge on the same interpretive schemas and heuristics.5 But if we take film studies to be more like art history or musicology, interpretive reading needn’t take precedence over a scrutiny of change and stability within stylistic practices.
In this effort we can learn a great deal from our predecessors. Over some eighty years scholars of distinction have bequeathed us a rich historiography of film style. The next three chapters trace the development of this research tradition. Throughout these chapters I conceive of a research tradition as constituted by a broadly marked-out field of inquiry, an approximate agreement on central problems in that field, and common methods of inquiry. Thus the historical study of film style is defined by its object—change and stability in film technique over time. It is also defined by a core set of problems about chronology, causality, affinity, influence, and the like. The study is also governed by shared methods, most centrally those of stylistic analysis.
A research tradition can harbor different, even conflicting, research programs. This term, rather than “theory,” captures the sense that film historians, while deploying conceptual structures, characteristically concentrate on re
THE WAY MOVIES LOOK