On the History of Film Style (2018)

306 13, See Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, De la littérature au cinéma (Paris: Colin, 1970), pp. 116-142. 14. Raymond Durgnat, “Images of the Mind, Part 2: Ebb and Flow,” Films and Filming 14, no. 11 (August 1968): 15; “Images of the Mind, Part 3: The Impossible Takes a Little Longer,” Films and Filming 14, no. 12 (September 1968): 14-15. 15. André Hodeir, Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music (New York: Grove Press, 1961); idem, Toward Jazz (New York: Grave Press, 1962); idem, The Worlds of Jazz (New York: Grove Press, 1972). 16. Noél Burch, “Qu’est-ce que la nouvelle vague?” Film Quarterly 13, no. 2 (Winter 1959): 26. 17. Ibid., p. 29. 18. Noél Burch, Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 29. A somewhat different translation of this passage is to be found in the English version, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 15. The French and English versions of this work sometimes differ significantly, partly because of translation and partly because of authorial revision. When the difference matters to my point, I supply page references for both versions. 19. Burch, Praxis, p. 23; Film Practice, p. 11. “From a formal point of view, a film is a succession of slices of time and slices of space .. . Two partial découpages (in space and time) are joined in a single Découpage” (my translation, Praxis, pp. 12-13; Film Practice, p. 4). 20. A precedent, and possible inspiration, for Burch’s argument here is Roger Leenardt’s 1964 suggestion that in an era in which the narrative film must subordinate visual form to meaning, it is rare to find “a fiction film in which the ‘facture’ is as important as the message”; Chroniques de cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1986), p. 208. 21. Burch, Praxis, p. 24; Film Practice, p. 12. See Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux: Essais interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil, 1966). 22. Jacques Rivette, “L’art du présent,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 132 (June 1962): 37. 23. Indeed, Kubelka explicitly compared his frame-units to Schoenbergian tonerows; see the discussion in Peter Weibel, “The Viennese Formal Film,” in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975, ed. Philip Drummond (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), pp. 108-111. On Kren see Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 96-102. 24. Burch criticizes Pollet’s film for its lack of an “organic” structuring principle; see Film Practice, pp. 71-74. 25. Burch’s conception of parametric cinema is invoked in several papers in a 1977 colloquium, Dominique Chateau, ed., Cinémas de la modernité: Films, théories (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981). In my own Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), I argue that Burch’s theory helps us identify an important option in the history of cinematic narration (pp. 274-310). 26. The most famous example is Brakhage’s comment on the sort of film he tried to create: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”; Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture, 1963), n.p. 27. Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971) and “Au-dela de NOTES TO PAGES 89-93