Authors: David Bordwell,Kristin Thompson
B0041VYHGW EBOK (134 page)
Our brief examination of
Citizen Kane
’s style has pointed out only a few of the major patterns in the film. You can find others: the musical motif associated with Kane’s power; the “K” motif appearing in Kane’s costumes and in Xanadu’s settings; the way the decor of Susan’s room in Xanadu reveals Kane’s attitude toward her; the changes in the acting of individuals as their characters age in the course of the story; and the playful photographic devices, such as the photos that become animated or the many superimpositions during montage sequences. Again and again in
Citizen Kane,
such stylistic patterns sustain and intensify the narrative development and shape the audience’s experience in particular ways.
This concludes our introduction of the basic cinematic techniques. We have suggested ways to analyze stylistic functions in the overall form of individual films. We offer further examples of analyses in Part Five. First, however, there’s one more factor that affects our experiences of the films we see.
Often, when we view a film, we think of it as belonging to a type or group of movies. Rather than say, “I’m going to see a film,” we may say, “I’m going to see a Western” or “I’m going to see a documentary.” Our friends are likely to understand what we mean, because such groupings are widely recognized in our culture. Part Four examines the main ways in which we categorize films.
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
Sometimes the concept of style is used evaluatively, to imply that something is inherently good (“Now that’s got real style!”). We are using the term descriptively. From our perspective, all films have style, because all films make
some
use of the techniques of the medium, and those techniques will necessarily be organized in some way.
For discussion of the concept of style in various arts, see Monroe C. Beardsley,
Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism
(New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1958); J. V. Cunningham, ed.,
The Problem of Style
(Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1996); and Berel Lang, ed.,
The Concept of Style,
rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Pioneering studies of style in the cinema are Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures” (originally published in 1937), in Daniel Talbot, ed.,
Film: An Anthology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970),
pp. 13
–32, and Raymond Durgnat,
Films and Feelings
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). Most of the works cited in the “Where to Go from Here” sections of the chapters in
Part Three
offer concrete studies of aspects of film style.
For essays on a wide variety of styles and films, see Lennard Højbjerg and Peter Schepelern, eds.,
Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003). For a survey of the different ways in which critics and historians have approached style, see David Bordwell,
On the History of Film Style
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Bordwell examines film style in the films of many periods, filmmakers, and countries in
Poetics of Cinema
(New York: Routledge, 2008).
An entire book has been written on the production of
Citizen Kane,
shedding much light on how its style was created: Robert L. Carringer’s
The Making of Citizen Kane
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Among other things, Carringer reveals the degree to which Welles and his collaborators used special effects for many of the film’s scenes. A tribute to the film, and a reprinting of Gregg Toland’s informative article on the film, “Realism for
Citizen Kane,
” is available in
American Cinematographer
72, 8 (August 1991): 34–42. Graham Bruce illuminates Bernhard Herrmann’s musical score for
Citizen Kane
in
Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985),
pp. 42
–57. See also Steven C. Smith,
A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). A detailed analysis of the film’s sound is Rick Altman, “Deep-Focus Sound:
Citizen Kane
and the Radio Aesthetic,”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video
15, 3 (December 1994): 1–33.
Supplements for DVDs often discuss individual film techniques and their functions, but they rarely consider how style functions systematically. Here are bonus features that try for a little analysis.
“The Making of
American Graffiti
” deals fairly extensively with the film’s style and includes comments by the great sound editor Walter Murch. In “The Leone Style,” on the DVD of
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
several apects of the director’s approach are discussed: the use of lengthy shots using a slow visual rhythm, juxtapositions of extreme long shots and extreme close-ups, imitations of paintings, and operatic grandeur.
“The Making of
My Own Private Idaho
” deals concretely with style as a formal system, comparing the techniques used at the film’s opening and ending, and tracing changes in the style as the story progresses. The featurette covers camera movement and angle, lighting, sets, and acting.
In “Elmer Bernstein and
The Magnificent Seven,
” film music expert Jon Burlingame compares musical and visual rhythm, which are sometimes strikingly in contrast. He also analyzes how the score’s themes and orchestrations function in the narrative.
“Anatomy of a Scene” analyzes the style in a sequence from
Far from Heaven.
It covers the production design and costumes, cinematography, acting, editing, and music. At the end, the completed scene is shown.
We launched our study of film as art by asking how our experience of a movie is shaped by technology and the process of production, distribution, and exhibition (
Chapter 1
). Then we considered how that experience is affected by a film’s overall form, particularly narrative form (
Chapters 2
–
3
). We went on to examine how the techniques of the film medium—mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound—give the filmmaker a wide range of artistic choices (
Chapters 4
–
8
). In the next two chapters, we’ll consider how filmmakers and audiences share certain expectations about the kinds of films that can be made and seen.
In most video stores, films are filed under different headings—by star, by period (Silent Movies), occasionally by director (Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen), by place of origin (Foreign Films). In order to understand how films work and how we experience them, we need to gain a sense of some significant ways audiences, filmmakers, reviewers, and film scholars sort films into groups.
One popular way of grouping fiction films is by genre, such as Westerns, musicals, war films, science fiction, and so on. These terms are used in everyday writing and talk, yet few of us stop to think how we come to share common assumptions about fitting movies into such categories. In
Chapter 9
, we’ll examine the concept of genres and consider how genre categories affect people’s attitudes toward the films they see. We’ll look briefly at three widely recognized genres: the Western, the horror film, and the musical.
Another way we group films is based on ideas of how they were made and what effects they attempt to achieve. In
Chapter 10
, we’ll discuss three major types of filmmaking: documentary, experimental, and animation.
Documentary films, as their name implies, document some aspect of the world. They are distinguished from fiction films because they are assumed to assert factual claims about the real world. Another particular kind of filmmaking is termed
experimental
. Such films play with film form and conventions in ways that confound audience expectations and provide unusual emotional appeals or intellectual challenges.
Finally, animated films are defined by the way they are made, using drawings, models, or other subjects photographed frame by frame to create illusory movements that never existed in front of the camera. Although we often think of animated films as being for children, we’ll see that virtually any type of film can be made using animation.
All moviegoers are familiar with the idea of genre, even if they don’t know the term. The word
genre
is originally French, and it simply means “kind” or “type.” It’s related to another word,
genus,
which is used in the biological sciences to classify groups of plants and animals. When we speak of film genres, we’re indicating certain types of movies. The science-fiction film, the action picture, the comedy, the romance, the musical, the Western—these are some genres of fictional storytelling cinema.
Scientists can usually place plants or animals within a single genus with confidence, but film genres lack that sort of scientific precision. Instead, genres are convenient terms that develop informally. Filmmakers, industry decision makers, critics, and viewers all contribute to the formation of a shared sense that certain films seem to resemble one another in significant ways. Genres also change over time, as filmmakers invent new twists on old formulas. Thus defining the precise boundaries between genres can be tricky.
The popular cinema of most countries rests on genre filmmaking. Germany has its
Heimatfilm,
the tale of small-town life. The Hindi cinema of India produces
devotionals,
films centering on the lives of saints and religious figures, as well as
mythologicals
derived from legend and literary classics. Mexican filmmakers developed the
cabaretera,
a type of melodrama centering on prostitutes.
When we think about genre, the examples that come to mind are usually those of fictional live-action films. We’ll see in the next chapter that there can be genres of other basic sorts of cinema, too. There are genres of documentary, such as the compilation film and the concert movie. Experimental films and animated films have genres as well.
Defining a Genre
Audiences know the genres of their culture very well, and so do filmmakers. The intriguing problem comes in defining just what a genre is. What places a group of films in a genre?
Most scholars now agree that no genre can be defined in a single hard-and-fast way. Some genres stand out by their subjects or themes. A gangster film centers on large-scale urban crime. A science fiction film features a technology beyond the reach of contemporary science. A Western is usually about life on some frontier (not necessarily the American West, as
North to Alaska
and
Drums Along the Mohawk
suggest).
Yet subject matter or theme is not so central to defining other genres. Musicals are recognizable chiefly by their manner of presentation: singing, dancing, or both. The detective film is partly defined by the plot pattern of an investigation that solves a mystery. And some genres are defined by the distinctive emotional effect they aim for: amusement in comedies, tension in suspense films.
The question is complicated by the fact that genres can be more or less broad. There are large, blanket genre categories that fit many films. We refer commonly to thrillers, yet that term may encompass horror films, detective stories, hostage films such as
Die Hard
or
Speed,
and many others. “Comedy” is a similarly broad term that includes slapstick comedies such as
Liar Liar,
romantic comedies such as
Knocked Up,
parodies such as the
Austin Powers
series, and gross-out comedies such as
There’s Something About Mary.
Thus
subgenres
can be devised by critics, viewers, or filmmakers to try to describe more precisely what films are like.
Still, there are limits to the precision with which the concept of genre can be applied. Any category contains both undeniable instances and fuzzy cases.
Singin’ in the Rain
is a prime example of a musical, but David Byrne’s
True Stories,
with its ironic presentation of musical numbers, is more of a borderline case. And an audience’s sense of the core cases can change over history. For modern audiences, a gory film such as
The Silence of the Lambs
probably exemplifies the thriller, whereas for audiences of the 1950s, a prime example would have been an urbane Hitchcock exercise such as
North by Northwest.
In other cases, films may seem to straddle two genre classifications. Is
Groundhog Day
a romantic comedy or a fantasy? Is
Psycho
a slasher film or a mystery thriller?
War of the Worlds
combines horror, science fiction, and family melodrama. (As we’ll see, mixing formulas like this is one important source of innovation and change in genres.) And, further, some films are so distinctive that critics and audiences have trouble assigning them to a category. When
Being John Malkovich
appeared in 1999, TV interviewers joked with the cast and crew about how impossible the film was to describe—hinting that they simply could not place it in a genre.
