Theory of the film : (character and growth of a new art) (1952)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO PROBLEMS OF STYLE The form-language of film art, although it has acquired an extraordinary power of expression, seems to have remained almost stationary in the past two decades during which more attention was given to content than to form. Now, after the end of the second world war, the as yet unexploited formal possibilities of the sound film seem to be entering on a new development. After the first emergence of a filmic form-language, distinct styles and art forms began to develop within the framework of film art. The problems connected with the film styles are particularly interesting and important because their social roots and significance are revealed more openly than in any other medium of art. THE EPIC This problem came to the fore in its most conscious form in the Soviet film, where general questions of principle always received much attention. The problem of the epic was among others the subject of heated arguments. Some demanded of the Soviet film that in conformity with its Socialist spirit, it should not depict intimate private affairs, but present only problems that concern the whole community — in other words that it should be of epic proportions. This not unjustified demand had its dangers, which soon showed in Soviet scripts; too little attention was given to the psychology of individuals and the films were sometimes less studies of human beings than historical panoramas painted with a certain sociological pedantry and limited to generalizations. Contrasting the epic and the intimate in this way poses the question incorrectly. Until the beginning of the nineteenth cen 266