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were useful, but they could have stood more refining. And the shortcomings of these writers’ work weren't only conceptual. The research programs were often excessively selective, or biased by preconceptions about what cinema had to be, or tipped in favor of films believed to be excellent.
Despite the problems with these programs, I feel a great affinity with their aims. My own work favors inquiries into the principles of how films are and have been made to produce discernible effects. I call this a poetics of cinema. I’ve explained the premises—theoretical, methodological—of this enterprise elsewhere.’ Studying the history of style is an important task for a poetics of film.
FROM PROJECT TO TRADITION
How does a research project launch a research program—that is, an ensemble of projects that share common questions, evidence, conceptual frames, and methods of inquiry? With respect to this book, I see one pattern fairly clearly, though it wasn't so clear to me back then.
In the early 1980s, I found myself focusing my scholarly work around three areas of interest: film style, film form (particularly narrative), and the psychology of the film viewer. The first two areas informed the project Kristin Thompson, Janet Staiger, and I undertook in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production (1985). My portions of that book tried to make explicit some principles of narrative and style that characterized the Hollywood film.
As that book was groping its way toward publication, I wrote Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), a study that sought to lay out principles of narrative construction for a wider variety of films. That book was also an occasion to explore how cognitive science could shed light on filmic comprehension. In the course of writing this book I realized that a concept of the poetics of cinema could unify my three areas of interest.
That new focus informed my study of a single director (Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, 1988) and my task-analysis treatment of film interpretation (Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, 1989). At the same time, Kristin and I were at work on a synoptic history of moving pictures, published in 1994 as Film History: An Introduction.
In those pre-DVD days, that project required trips to many archives. But the effort paid off. Watching scores of films from around the world, most made since 1945, I was able to track some patterns of change in film technique. The later stretch of Chapter 6 in this book comes almost completely out of examples, famous and not so famous, that I encountered while preparing Film History.
AFTERWORD
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