"Introduction" / 381
Noël Carroll
"Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory
of Style in the Individual Film" / 385
Lea Jacobs
"Keeping Up with Hawks" / 403
Charles O'Brien
"Stylistic Description as Historical Method:
French Films of the German Occupation" / 429
Scott Higgins
"Color at the Center: Minnelli's Technicolor Style
in Meet Me in St. Louis" / 452
Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack
"Forget the Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in
John Sayles's Lone Star" / 475
José Eduardo González
"Borges and the Classical Hollywood Cinema" / 490
During the silent era, film theorists put style at the center of their concerns, but since, and until quite recently, stylistics has been ignored in favor of interpretation-driven criticism and theorizing. At the moment, however, stylistics of cinema is returning to the fore in such areas as cognitive theory and studies of early film and national cinemas. The essays collected here reflect this resurgence, while the emergence of directors with strong personal styles, such as Kiarostami, Kitano, and Wong Kar-wai, indicates that we still face many unanswered questions about how style works and works upon us.
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Noël Carroll, "Film Form: An Argument
for a Functional Theory of Style in the Individual Film" / 385
This article reviews the different domains of stylistic analysis in
film, including universal style, period style, genre style, school/movement
style, and personal style. It then argues that the style of the individual
film cannot be reduced without remainder to any of the preceding categories
of style. In order to provide a framework for anaylysing style (or form)
in the individual film, it considers several alternatives, including descriptive
analysis, opting finally for the functional approach which regards stylistic
choices as those that realize the point or purpose of a film.
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Lea Jacobs, "Keeping Up with Hawks" / 403
His Girl Friday is famously "fast" and, as per Hawks's boast, is often
said to be "faster" than Lewis Milestone's earlier film version, The Front
Page. The essay aims to account for the spectator's sense of tempo, considering
how the variable rhythms of editing, speaking, and figure movement interact
and how they help to articulate the rhythm of the film as a whole. A comparison
of His Girl Friday and The Front Page provides an opportunity to contrast
the performance and staging of similar scenes and yields tools for analyzing
acting, one of the most difficult areas of film style to analyze.
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Charles O'Brien, "Stylistic Description
as Historical Method: French Films of the German Occupation" / 429
This article uses the French cinema of the occupation as a case study
for inquiry into the function of stylistic analysis within film historiography.
Centering on techniques of film sound, the case study concerns a shift
away from direct sound, the standard sound technique in France during the
1930s, and toward postsynchronization, which became the norm during the
occupation. The basic methodological claim is that the descriptive
analysis of film style can reveal a pre-reflective aspect of film practice
inaccessible to critical approaches that attempt to explain style with
reference to causes external to the domain of film practice.
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Scott Higgins, "Color at the Center: Minnelli's
Technicolor Style in Meet Me in St. Louis" / 452
Meet Me in St. Louis, produced by Arthur Freed's musical unit at MGM
in 1944, offers an outstanding example of how color could serve the demands
of classical filmmaking. The film exhibits an innovative confidence in
the way it moves color toward the center of its stylistic system. Under
Vincente Minnelli's direction, Technicolor becomes a key contributor to
the moment by moment shaping of visual information, making images striking,
comprehensible, and affecting. This essay seeks to pinpoint the nature
of color in Meet Me in St. Louis through detailed analysis. The essay isolates
color's functions and explicates the film's color design against the background
of contemporaneous aesthetic trends. By presenting an overview of the film's
color strategies and closely analyzing a single sequence, it illustrates
how the production largely conforms to conventions of Technicolor design
while also elaborating them to make color a particularly forceful element
of film style.
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Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, "Forget the
Alamo: Reading the Ethics of Style in John Sayles's Lone Star" / 475
In Lone Star, John Sayles exploits the incest taboo as the vehicle
for his analysis of the interconnected ethnic threads that constitute contemporary
American life and the often uneasy relationships that continue to exist
between the races. Sayles's incest metaphor also provides the writer and
filmmaker with a means for exploring the ways in which our shared history
impinges upon the ethical choices that confront us in the present. By using
a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Sayles highlights the sociological
disjunctions between the segregated past and its relationship to the ethnic
tensions that plague the historical present of the border town Frontera,
Texas. With Lone Star, the application of Gérard Genette's narrative
principles demonstrates the moral impact of Sayles's visual style, as well
as of his strategic, ethically motivated tampering with traditional conceptions
of time and place.
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José Eduardo González, "Borges
and the Classical Hollywood Cinema" / 490
Borges's preference for Hollywood movies is a constant in his writings
about cinema. The North American mode of film production that Borges so
much admires has been given the name "classical Hollywood cinema" by film
theorists, who have defined it as a standard form or style that reigned
supreme between 1915 and 1938 and which is still influential today. Classical
cinema was as much the result of the studio system as of the personality
of the film director. Borges finds similarities from literature and Hollywood
movies because he views the importance of tradition in the creation of
new artistic works. For Borges, the challenge both in literature and cinema
comes in creating an original work with a limited range of possibilities.
While making fun of the typical plots of Hollywood classical cinema by
emphasizing its melodramatic elements, Borges lets us know that he is interested
in a film form that is a consequence of this cinematic tradition and not
in claiming that Hollywood produces high art.
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