On the History of Film Style (2018)

your plot to fit it?*° If you’ve chosen to tell a story nonlinearly, you face problems of the placement and extent of the flashbacks, which will in turn create pressures on how you design the present-time sequences. If only as an heuristic that prods the researcher to see the different effects of various options, the problem/solution couplet can assist a research project. What about the second mid-range conceptual tool, schemas? Once we think of film style as an array of functional technical choices, we can isolate standard patterns favored by tradition. Shallow focus is such a schema, and deep-focus a la Welles and Wyler became one. Other schemas are the conventions of analytical cutting, like shot/reverse shot, and of camera movement, such as tracking with a moving figure. For any situation we can sketch out a menu, a chart of alternative schemas in force in a particular milieu. They're more or less closed sets of options; a crane shot is very unlikely in the 1910s, while tableau staging is very unlikely in modern Hollywood. In the spirit of middle-level theorizing, I suggested that we can think of filmmakers facing four choices about any schema they confront. They can replicate it; they can revise it; they can blend it with another one; or they can reject it. Most filmmakers replicate schemas most of the time, while some will revise one to suit the purpose at hand. Mizoguchis Naniwa Elegy, I suggested, recast deep-space schemas that favored frontality. In Figures 6.136-6.137 (p. 216), we get instead “dorsality,’ a scene played out with characters’ backs to us. This revision of a standard schema creates suspense and uncertainty while powerfully expressing the heroines shame, making her shrink not only from her boyfriend but also the viewer. Filmmakers can also synthesize schemas, as when both Eisenstein and Welles embrace wide-angle compositions and aggressive editing. As for rejection, examples would be those silent filmmakers who abandoned the long-take tableau tradition in favor of continuity editing, or the more recent filmmakers who returned to tableau principles and repudiated scene breakdown.’’ This last case shows how a new schema can be borrowed an earlier filmmaking tradition. The process of schema revision can inspire the filmmaker to reshape the work in fine grain. Call it the compulsions of craft. I wrote in another book something relevant here: In popular art, novelty may also spring from the sheer demands of craft. When an artist begins reworking a received device, matters of workmanship impose themselves. The artist, at least the alert and ambitious one, gets caught up in intricacies of elaboration. New opportunities are flushed out. Here is a chance for a symmetry or an echo; there I can counterbalance something earlier; over there I can create AFTERWORD 285