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natural vision and each preserving certain spatial information. In a range of cultural conditions, these systems have founded alternative drawing systems. '”
Chapter 6 didn’t exhaust the subject of depth staging or my interest in it, so I continued to visit archives searching for evidence and counterexamples. One fruit of all this was the book Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005), which studied two directors of recent years (Angelopoulos, Hou) alongside two heroes of Chapter 6, Feuillade and Mizoguchi. In a sense this was an auteur book: How did particular directors make characteristic use of the staging menu of their times? The project enabled me to reveal resources of what Eisenstein called mise-en-cadre, the fluid choreography of figures in a frame. Since then, Pve also written blog entries chronicling my more recent analyses of the 1910s tradition, along with essays and a video lecture on widescreen staging.’
In sum, my effort to tackle particular questions led to posing other questions, while the ideas and analytical methods applied to one domain shifted more or less easily to another. Out of linked research projects, a research program emerged. Call it comparative stylistics. I think it's an important initiative within a historical poetics of cinema. As such, that program joins the research tradition that I sought to reveal in this book.
MODERN PROBLEMS
A minor theme running through the book is film's relation to modernism in the arts. German Expressionist cinema was identified with tendencies in painting and theatre, while abstract films like Ballet Mécanique had clear affinities with Cubism and the machine aesthetic. Soviet Montage cinema owed a debt to Constructivism, and Dada and Surrealism left their marks on Entracte (1924) and Un chien andalou (1929). Despite its nickname, French Impressionism was less marked by Impressionist painting than by Symbolism and, intermittently, Art Deco.
Bazin and the other participants in la nouvelle critique tended to claim that sound cinemas expressive advances took place in the commercial cinema, not in the official avant-gardes. It remained for other historians, notably P. Adams Sitney in the US., to show the relationship of Action Painting and other tendencies to experimental film. But Noél Burch, aware of broad experimental tendencies in European and American art and music, was able to claim a kind of modernism for directors in the “crest line” of commercial cinema, from Caligari to Marcel Hanoun. He suggested as well affinities among these, the experimental avant-garde, classic Japanese cinema, and early cinema's “Primitive Mode of Representation.”
AFTERWORD