Preface to the Croatian edition of On the History of Film Style

On the History of Film Style, (O povijesti filmskoga stila. Zagreb: Croatian Fil
m Clubs Association, 2005).
August 2005
Visual style was a major preoccupation of critics, theorists, and filmmakers in
the 1920s and thereafter, yet the study of it unaccountably went out of favor at
just the moment when it should have been in full flower. As film studies entere
d the Western academy in the 1970s, most scholars turned away from such aesthetic
concerns. Instead they promoted a cultural/political framework for examining cin
ema, emphasizing a symptomatic method of interpretation and a metapsychology der
ived from psychoanalysis. The influence of this framework is still being felt: S
lavoj iek is continuing it, more playfully but no less dogmatically. Todays most in
fluential frame of reference, cultural studies, has continued the anti-aesthetic
tradition, replacing questions of artistic design and effect with questions abo
ut audiences and broad cultural processes.
Even in the 1970s, however, there were some exceptions. In Film as Film (1972),
V.F. Perkins proposed a theory of style as narratively motivated expressivity. A
group of scholars in my department at the University of WisconsinMadison (Kristi
n Thompson, Edward Branigan, and myself) explored stylistic organization in film
s by Ozu, Dreyer, and others. Avant-garde uses of style were examined by P. Adam
s Sitney, Nol Carroll, Fred Camper, Paul Arthur, and other scholars clustered at
New York University. Most numerous were scholars of early cinema; thanks to the
new availability of prints, a generation of researchers tested many traditional
claims about the origins of editing, lighting, point-of-view framings, and the l
ike. Although many of those scholars would eventually shift their concerns to cu
ltural matters, they showed that the birth of film language was a far more complic
ated affair than we had believed.
I am of this generation, and On the History of Film Style bears witness to my st
ubborn insistence that style matters a great deal. At one level, the book is an
effort to mount a historiography of one strand of film studies: the ways in whic
h Western thinkers have told a story about the continuity and change in one aspe
ct of cinematic art. I organize the major trends into three research programs and
try to show how later ones built upon their predecessors. I also suggest that in
order to explain how style functions in films, and how it has changed over time
, these programs presuppose some solidly existing cinematic practices. That is,
regardless of the differences among the three research programs, they are oblige
d to work with descriptive tools bequeathed us by filmmakers (editing, camera mo
vement, etc.) and earlier writers (alternating editing, deep-focus staging). Histo
rians of film style have agreed to a very large extent about what phenomena are
to be explained; they have disagreed about the best ways to explain them.
One theme of the book is the belief that historians of style have sought to scul
pt patterns of change and continuity into a large-scale narrative. The first suc
h story is the silent eras evolution of film language, utilizing a birth/maturity/d
ecline metaphor. A somewhat different tale relies upon the dialectical dynamic p
roposed by Bazin, whereby the silent cinemas stylistic tradition splits apart and
reunifies itself at a higher level. A third narrative is that of long-term runn
ing opposition, with a dominant practicemainstream entertainment filmmakingconstan
tly deconstructed by avant-garde practices (the model suggested by Nol Burch). I ar
gue that such grand arcs are too simple, sacrificing nuance and variety to sweep
ing, quasi-Hegelian patterns. (Such, I suggest, is the problem as well with the
historical assumptions underlying the film theory of Gilles Deleuze.) Better to
think of continuity and change in film style as presenting no grand narrative bu
t rather a linked set of problems and solutions, with each problem producing sev
eral solutions, each solution posing a new cluster of opportunities and obstacle

s. There is a certain unity to this exfoliating processsome problems persist, som

e solutions become canonical-but filmmakers will constantly experiment with new
ways to fulfill old needs, in the process generating new needs. I try to illustr
ate this process in the last and longest chapter by tracing a history of depth s
taging as a linked set of problems and solutions.
Upon its original publication, this book encountered objections of several sorts
. Since Ive tried to answer several of those in a forthcoming study, Figures Trac
ed in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 200
5), I will just indicate here that many of these rebuttals proposed no alternati
ve answer to the questions I have posed. Some critics suggested that the very st
udy of style was negligible when there were more important things, like politica
l ideology, to be studied. But this is no objection to the conduct of my inquiry
, only a desire that I do something else. I confess as well that I have never mu
ch trusted what film academics say about politics; most of it looks deeply nave i
f compared to work in genuine political science.
Other critics claimed that the failings of my argument were those of cognitive fi
lm studies; but this objection rested on a misunderstanding. There is nothing dis
tinctively cognitive about the claims I make here. For instance, my assumptions ab
out rational agency are minimal. I assume that filmmakers make choices, are resp
onsible for them, but may see those choices eventuate in unforeseen consequences
. Academics certainly claim agency for themselves in exactly these dimensions; w
hy should we deny them to filmmakers?
Still other critics remarked that the problem I tackle in the last chapterthat of
how the viewer could be brought to notice salient narrative informationis concei
ved too narrowly. While I agree that narrative denotation is not the sole functi
on of style, it is a central one; its hard to imagination a filmmaker working in
the narrative tradition who did not want us to notice certain story information.
(Even if he or she is misdirecting our attention, steering us to negligible ite
ms to distract us from other things, the filmmaker is still coaxing us to notice
some things and not others.) Of course I state that this is not the only proble
m of visual design facing the filmmaker, and in Figures Traced in Light I propos
e some other problems that are no less important.
Critics launched some more abstract objections as well, such as reservations abo
ut rational agency tout court, or ruminations that perhaps only Western narrativ
e wants to make story information salient (iek again), but these were floated in s
uch speculative fashion that they remain, as stated by my critics, idle. This br
eed of casual, ad hoc reply is a sign that film studies is still far from being
in the mainstream of empirical inquiry, where argument from evidence, not ideolo
gy, is the principal means of advancing knowledge. We have learned, I hope, from
the collapse of 1970s Grand Theory that theorizing without data, or by inflatin
g an emblematic example, is a barren enterprise.
Not that On the History of Film Style is invulnerable to critique. Im probably mo
re aware of its shortcomings than any of my critics. Still, if it spurs other re
searchers to test its conceptual framework, the range of its evidence, and my ar
gumentative conclusions, I shall be content.
Finally, I am grateful to my Croatian colleagues for making this book available
to readers in their country. I look forward to continuing the conversation in th
e years ahead.