my impression of the history of film-style

Books Even before film school, my impression of the history of film-style, most specifically cinematography was built on a very solid progression of ‘classic’ films and directors, which Bordwell outlines as “running from A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery through The Battleship Potemkin and Citizen Kane to Breathless and beyond”. Even during introduction to theory classes these were, more or less, the baseline "texts", the pinnacles that every other film had to be compared to. It’s in these films, the history of the subject tells us, we learn how the classical forms were created and broken, continuity editing and montage, close-ups, deep focus, the symbolic mise-en-scene.

Except that over time, as the availability of other "texts" has increased and from across the world, and so called lost films have become rediscovered, it’s become apparent that all of these creations fit within a far richer corpus of work and rather than pioneering these techniques, reconstitute them in a more innovative form. But, as David Bordwell explains in On The History of Film Style, the critical approach has had difficult keeping in step with these changes and spends an awful lot of time disregarding other work because it doesn’t fit their expectations or else unable to see the development of film as a multistranded affair rather than the single evolutionary path they’re used to.

A typical example Bordwell identifies is in early silent film which was generally considered by critics as flat and lacking in nuance until Griffiths came along, when in fact in some feature films, very complex staging is taking place so that the viewers eye is drawn towards props, character and action. The entrance of a character might be signalled by an unrelated character moving to reveal a doorway, or action may be still other than a hand movement which signals the most important element of the scene a kind of editing of the eye rather than in frame, taking advantage of the audience’s still current experience of theatre.

Like all of Bordwell's work, it's a fascinating read despite its academic density and the second half which offers a rough history of this kind of deep-focus staging is the most accessible as it demonstrates what’s been lost in the move from black and white to colour, from a square frame to widescreen, the decrease in the length of a typical shot. A foreshortening of focal length from feet to mere inches led films to shift from being able to show in detail the background and foreground of a scene with the visual richness that allows to one or the other, and as a result there are more cuts so that the director can show all of the important elements of a scene.

Much has changes since the 1998 publication of the book, the increased use of digital-video camera that have a filmic quality, polarised 3D and the sheer availability of the last century in film for study purposes. Though as Bordwell notes in the latter stages, and this continues to be true, the new directors perceived to be innovators are actually just resurrecting old techniques for new audience. As he demonstrates in this later blog post, the reason Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood seems so fresh is because it was resurrecting staging techniques which haven’t seen the inside of a movie theatre in decades, the history of film style presently narratively within a few hours.