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historians tended to sponsor a teleological conception of history. Delighted to discover a complexity of expression in the silent classics, they declared editing, “pure movement,” or other qualities of those advanced works to be essentially cinematic. They then projected that essence back onto cinema’s origins, treating most significant changes in style as developing toward that goal. As a result, Standard Version historians tended to ignore any event that did not fit their scenario. The disparities of cutting to be found in Porter’s films, the ways in which Griffith’s work does not anticipate the editing practices that would come to be standardized, the strategies of depth staging that emerged in the 1910s, the moments when Eisenstein’s cuts are resolutely nondialectical—all these divergences from the path of cinema’s necessary trajectory are simply ignored.
Part of the difficulty stems from the problem of the present, the inclination to take the contemporary moment as the ideal vantage point. The saliency of camerawork and editing in certain 1920s masterworks encouraged historians to measure cinema’s progress in relation to them. Because early sound films seemed crude along those dimensions, writers fell back upon a birth-maturity-decline dynamic. Attuned to change rather than to continuity, Standard Version historians saw the advent of sound as an extrastylistic force; businessmen’s desire for a technological novelty made technique regress. They did not consider the possibility that sound also promoted and reconfigured certain stylistic tendencies that had come to the fore in the silent cinema, such as spatial realism, temporal continuity, and dialogue-based scene construction.
Up to the arrival of sound, these writers presume, the history of cinema was largely a linear ascent in sophistication and complexity, a development from primitive forms to more refined ones. But the historians, by committing themselves to a search for a single overarching pattern, tend not to treat historical actions as shaped by a multitude of factors. When Panofsky writes that the medium itself gradually became conscious of its unique capacities, all contingent causes are swept aside by the inexorable advance of filmic expression, a kind of demiurge of Cinema. The essence of film art, seeking forms through which it can manifest itself, is embodied in works that actually came into being for very diverse concrete reasons. And what if this essence is very different than the Standard Version supposes? What if cinema does not have an essence at all?
The Standard Version eagerly accepted the biological analogy. But the very terms of youth-maturity-death presuppose what needs to be discovered through concrete investigation: the patterns among the works themselves. There is no reason to believe that stylistic change obeys any large-scale laws. A style may develop from simplicity to complexity, or from complexity to simplicity. Besides, as Truffaut pointed out in a review of a 1950s edition of
THE STANDARD VERSION OF STYLISTIC HISTORY
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