Film form: an argument for a functional theory of style in the individual film - Style in Cinema

by Noel Carroll

Part I: The Different Domains of Style

As with other artforms, the initial problem of talking about style or form in film is complicated by the fact that the concept of style can be applied to so many different kinds of things and at so many different levels of generality.(1) One might use "style" to refer to whole periods of filmmaking, speaking, for example, of the German Expressionist style, or Hollywood studio style in the thirties. Or one might apply the concept of style to the work of a particular filmmaker's oeuvre, referring, for instance, to the style of Stanley Donnen or Yvonne Rainer or Theo Angelopoulos. In these cases, the domain of the concept of style fluctuates. That is, what it refers to shifts in terms of the range of things to which it is applied. When investigating a period style, we look at a domain comprising all the relevant films made in a stipulated spatio-temporal region. When considering a directorial style, we look only to the films of the director in question, including, where relevant, films of different stylistic periods.

Moreover, the concept of style can be mobilized for different purposes and, therefore, can take different directions of analysis. When interrogating a period style, our purpose is to say how all or most of the relevant films are similar, and, therefore, we look for what all the filmmakers under examination have in common. But when analyzing a directorial style, we look to features that differentiate a given filmmaker from other filmmakers - we look for what makes the director appear distinctive. And these different projects, of course, can pull in different directions. In discussing the work of Fritz Lang as a German Expressionist director, we may point to certain features of his work he shares with other directors of the pertinent movement and period, but when speaking of Lang's directorial style, we may omit some of these features, since they do not differentiate Lang from other directors.

Because the domains, purposes and directions of stylistic or formal research often diverge, the possibility of confusion - of talking past each other - an easily arise when speaking of "film style." Thus, in order to avoid such confusion, it is useful to separate out some of the different usages of the concept of film style in order to be clear about that to which we intend to apply it. Though other, more fine-grained, distinctions can be made with respect to the concept of style, a provisional cartography of common usages includes what we can call general style, personal style, and the style or form of the individual film.(2) Both general style and personal style refer to groups of film; their domain is a body of work. The style or form of the individual film refers to a specific film, such as Kundun. General style refers to a group of films by more than one filmmaker as in the notion of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Personal style refers to the films of a single filmmaker, such as Edward Yang.

The category of general style can be further divided into at least four subclasses: universal style, period style, genre style, and school or movement style.(3) If we call the balanced shot outside the planetarium in Nichols Ray's Rebel Without A Cause (Bordwell 244) "classical," we are using the concept of style in a universal sense, since we will call any such symmetrically poised composition, from any period in film history (and, perhaps in any visual artform), "classical" in this sense. The domain of the concept of style when used universally is at least all film. When we refer, however, to the tableau style or to the "clothes-line" style of composition of primitive film, though we are talking about a general style (and not the style of a specific filmmaker), our reference is restricted, with the exception of explicit references to atavisms, to films of the first two decades of this century. The universal concept of style applies to all films, whereas the concept of a period style applies only to some subset thereof governed by temporal/historical criteria and often by regional (sometimes national) considerations.

Generally, a filmmaker possesses a period style tacitly. She does not decide to work in that style explicitly. It is a prevailing style of norms and practices. Vincent Sherman did not decide to adopt a thirties studio style when he came to make his first film The Return of Dr. X. He found it, so to speak, ready-to-hand. School or movement style, in contrast, is more a matter of express policy. A structural filmmaker decides to work in that style, perhaps by expanding its strategies in new directions. Though both period style and school/movement style differ from universal style inasmuch as they obtain in a subset of films of specific provenance rather than potentially in any film whatsoever, school/movement style differs from period style insofar as it is more a matter of self-consciously adopting a project than of settling into things as they are. School/movement style, however, generally does have something in common with period style, since schools and movements most frequently flourish in discrete historical moments.

With reference to general styles, there is also genre style. Many films fall into certain categories with relatively fixed, though variable, purposes, whose implementation often involves certain reliable, recurring strategies for getting the job done. These stylistic strategies may evolve and mutate from period to period, so genre style overlaps at times with the notion of a period style. Thus we speak of a film in the style of a fifties musical. But as in the case of a school style, the filmmaker adopts a genre style rather self-consciously: she is at least fully aware, for instance, that she is making a mystery film. Moreover, in contrast to the universal concept of style, the concept of genre style can be applied only to certain films, not potentially to all films. For example, it only makes sense to apply literally the style or form descriptors "ratiocinative versus hard-boiled" to detection fictions, but not to landscape films.

Personal style can be distinguished from the several categories of general style, since it targets the work of a specific filmmaker. Though historically, the director has been the filmmaker of choice in analyses of personal style in film, there is no reason in principle why one must restrict one's attention to directors. One might explore the personal style of a scriptwriter, a cinematographer, a set designer and so on. The preoccupation with the personal style of directors is often called auteurism. Its influence since the 1950s has been enormous. As a result, perhaps the most recurrent form of stylistic analysis in film studies has been keyed to discriminating personal styles.

Nevertheless, there is yet another project of stylistic analysis: the analysis of style or form in the individual film. The style of an individual film does not collapse, without remainder, into the personal style of its director. The reason for this is simple. Even a film by a director with a highly distinctive personal style may employ stylistic strategies not uniquely his or her own. A pronounced visual stylist like Brian DePalma may fall back on certain tried and true structures, common throughout the genre, for instilling suspense in order to solve his narrative problems. His use of these structures is not incidental, but integral to his film.

Thus, where the auteurist critic may overlook such choices - on the grounds that they do not differentiate a given film by DePalma from a mass of routine thrillers - if we are concerned with the style or form of the individual film, said structures are apt to loom large in our account. Because the analysis of personal style is concerned with taxonomy (and connoiseurship), it battens on those stylistic features that isolate the film in question as one by DePalma. But that is likely to leave a large number of a given film's stylistic features unaccounted for, since very few films are absolutely the product of uniquely personal strategies through and through.