Warren Buckland

What Does the Statistical Style Analysis of Film Involve? A Review of Moving into Pictures. More on Film History, Style, and Analysis

Barry Salt. Moving into Pictures. More on Film History, Style, and Analysis, London: Starword, 2006. 444 pp. ISBN 978-0-9509066-4-5. £18.00. (paperback). An immediate answer to the question stated in my title is: ask Barry Salt. For over 30 years he has almost single-handedly established statistical style analysis as a research paradigm in film studies. In 2006, he published his collected essays under the title Moving into Pictures (Salt, 2006). This is a large-scale anthology of forty-three of Salt’s essays on film history, film style and statistical style analysis. It is a large-format (8.5 by 11 inches), double-columned volume of 444 pages, weighing 3.5 pounds, lavishly illustrated with almost 600 stills taken directly from films. Many of the essays were written and published for specific occasions (conferences, anthologies) and others were generated from Salt’s personal curiosity in exploring film style. Moving into Pictures begins autobiographically. Salt informs us of his unusual path to the statistical style analysis of film: he was a ballet dancer, worked in computing in the 1950s, and studied for a PhD in theoretical physics under David Bohm. Salt tells us that he researched superfluid Helium and co-authored a paper with Bohm. But Salt realized ‘I could have gone on being a mediocre theoretical physicist the rest of my life’ (2006, p. 11). Instead, he turned to his other passion, filmmaking, which he also taught and researched. Between each paper, Salt offers more autobiography as well as background information on who published (or did not publish) the paper, what kind of reaction he received, the various London institutions in which he taught, and the conferences at which he presented his research. In the following pages, I give an overview of Barry Salt’s work, culminating in a review of the statistical papers in Moving into Pictures.

Wes Anderson: a ‘smart’ director of the new sincerity?

In response to my call for academic papers on the films of Wes Anderson – 10 of which are published in this special issue – two key terms regularly cropped up to make sense of his films: the ‘smart’ film and the ‘new sincerity’. In an essay published in 2002, Jeffrey Sconce set out to identify the stylistic, narrative and thematic elements present in what he called the new American ‘smart’ film. According to Sconce, this loose grouping of filmmakers includes Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute, Hal Hartley, Alexander Payne, P.T. Anderson, as well as Wes Anderson (whom Sconce only mentions in passing). Their smart films are ‘not quite “art” films in the sober Bergmanesque art-house tradition, nor “Hollywood” films in the sense of 1200-screen saturation bombing campaigns, nor “independent” films according to the DIY outsider credo’. Instead, ‘“smart” films . . . share an “aura” of intelligence that distinguishes them (and their audiences) from the perceived “dross” (and “rabble”) of the mainstream multiplex’ (Sconce 2002, 351). The cohesion of smart films is created through their shared manifestation of a sensibility or ‘structure of feeling’ that articulates the historical moment of the 1990s: the postmodern sensibility of Generation-X, which Sconce characterises as a mix of cynicism, irony, secular humanism and cultural relativism. Sconce focuses in on irony – on ironic disengagement, nonparticipation and disaffection. This ironic disengagement ismanifest in smart films through a ‘blank’ style of filmmaking, involving the use of long-shots, static composition, awkward two-shots (or family gatherings) and sparse cutting. This style creates an experience of distance in the audience, which Sconce characterises as a form of ‘clinical observation’ (rather than Brechtian distanciation) (360). Whereas critics of these films identify them as apolitical and amoral, Sconce argues that they manifest an ambiguous attitude towards politics and morality, coupled with a critique of contemporary society: ‘To the extent that these films have an explicit political agenda, it lies in the familiar theme that repression and miscommunication make the white middle class particularly ill-suited to either relationships or marriage’ (384). Sconce places Wes Anderson squarely within this smart film tradition. However, many authors (following Mark Olsen [1999]) place him in the opposite, new sincerity camp. Jim Collins is generally credited as the first to

The Routledge encyclopedia of film theory

Affect. Anglo-American Film Theory. Apparatus Theory (Baudry). Apparatus Theory (Plato). Art, Film as. Attention. Attraction. Auteur Theory. Blending and Film Theory. Brecht and Film. Camera. Cinematic Movement. Classic Realist Text. Classical Film Theory. Close-up. Cognitive Film Theory. Concept. Contemporary Film Theory. Counter Cinema. Depth of Field. Dialogism. Diegesis. Digital Cinema. Documentary Theory. Emotion, Film and. Enunciation. Ethics. European Film Theory. Evidence (Jean-Luc Nancy). Excess, Cinematic. Fantasy and Spectatorship. Feminist Film Theory, Core Concepts. Feminist Film Theory, History of. Film Fable (Ranciere). Film-Philosophy. Formalist Theories of Film. Gaming and Film Theory. Gaze Theory. Genre Theory. Identification, Theory of. Ideology. Illusion. Imaginary Signifier. Imagined Observer Hypothesis. Inaesthetics (Badiou). Interface. Long Take. Memory and Film. Mimetic Innervation. Minor Cinema. Mise en Scene. Modernism versus Realism. Montage Theory I (Hollywood). Montage Theory II (Soviet Avant-Garde). Movement-Image. Narration. Ontology of the Photographic Image. Ordinary Man of the Cinema (Schefer). Perspectivism versus Realism. Phenomenology and Film. Pixel/Cut/Vector. Poetic Cinema. Point of View. Postmodern Cinema. Queer Theory. Reception Theory. Redemption. Representation. Rhetoric, Film and. Seeing/Perceiving. Semiotics of Film. Skepticism. Sound Theory. Specificity, Medium I. Specificity, Medium II. Structural/Materialist Film. Suture. Symbol and Analogon. Symptomatic Reading. Third World Cinema. Time-Image. Trauma. Voice.

Solipsistic film criticism. Review of The Language and Style of Film Criticism

This review of The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Klevan and Clayton) considers the presuppositions of romantic film-philosophy, its influence on film criticism, and its tendency towards solipsism. This review also presents a theoretical framework for analysing descriptive passages in film criticism.

Software takes command

providing access to watching TV shows online, the Internet has altered what it means to be a ‘TV viewer’. Yet, the Internet’s effect on TV is not just limited to the altered viewing habits, but it created a new ‘aesthetic of multiplicity’, which reflected itself on TV aesthetics with ‘multiple layers of information’ forming a ‘mosaic of different but interconnecting elements that the viewer will be able to manipulate at will’ (110). In the final chapter Creeber looks at WEB TV, which he describes as ‘the content made solely to be broadcasted and watched online’ (10). In this chapter he argues that the three components he theorized for ‘Early TV’ – ‘liveness, intimacy and hybridity’ – can be loosely applied to the user-generated video content found online. Although Internet content, like film, cannot embody a televisual liveness, still plenty of live content exists for the purpose of delivering the live, instantaneous moments to others. In this sense, one of the case studies of this chapter is webcam, which creates basically real-life and real-time aesthetics. In the second half of this chapter Creeber looks at webisodes and micro-soaps. In doing so, he not only introduces these Internet narratives to a larger audience; he also contextualizes them in relation to the evolution of TV aesthetics that he foregrounds in his book. Thus, on one side, Small Screen Aesthetics provides a rich and detailed historical account of the emergence and the evolution of TV aesthetics since the 1920s and, on the other side, it sheds light on a very new and insufficiently studied field of Web TV and web narratives that are actively being produced today. From this perspective Creeber’s book is a significant resource for both media students and scholars as well as for those who are curious to know more about the screen aesthetics that have been consuming most of our leisure time.

David Lynch swerves: uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire

In the previous four years, numerous academic books have been published in English on the films of David Lynch – from Daniel Neofetou’sGood Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator (Zero Books, 2012), Justus Nieland’s David Lynch (University of Illinois Press, 2012), Antony Todd’s Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Reception in Contemporary Hollywood (I.B. Tauris, 2012), Greg Olson’s David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (Scarecrow Press, 2011), andWilliam J. Devlin and Shai Biderman’s edited volume The Philosophy of David Lynch (The University Press of Kentucky, 2011) to Allister Mactaggart’s The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory (Intellect, 2010). In her latest book, Martha P. Nochimson has added to this growing literature. She has followed up her 1997 volume, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (University of Texas Press), with David Lynch Swerves (2013), an analysis of what she calls Lynch’s post-1997, ‘secondstage’ films – Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Nochimson’s The Passion of David Lynch only contained a brief analysis of Lost Highway in the book’s Coda. In the Preface to her latest book, she expresses dissatisfaction with her discussion of that film in the Coda, because she now sees the film as marking a fundamental change in Lynch’s filmmaking. She believes that her theoretical framework in 1997 (Jungian analysis) was not up to the task of confronting Lost Highway:

Review of Richard Rushton, The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality

This review focuses on Richard Rushtons The Reality of Film (Manchester University Press, 2011), a book that does not study filmic realism – films representation of reality – but the innate reality of film. The books main argument is that films innate reality is a part of reality, not a representation of it. Rushton presents his case through a reading of the work of André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière.

THE DEATH OF THE CAMERA

In this paper I examine how Edward Branigan, in his new book Projecting a Camera: Language‐Games in Film Theory (2006), uses Wittgensteins later philosophy to describe the multiple, contradictory, literal and metaphorical meanings of fundamental concepts in film theory—such as ‘movement’, ‘point of view’, ‘camera’, ‘frame’ and ‘causality’. Towards the end of the paper I rationally reconstruct Branigans main arguments in chapter 3, ‘What Is a Camera?’ I use Rudolf Bothas philosophical study into the conduct of inquiry to analyze the way Branigan formulates conceptual and empirical problems, and how he solves them.

Introduction to the First Issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies. Meaningful research in film and television studies

Humanities scholarship, of which film studies has been a privileged example since the early 1970s (and television studies since the 1980s), is awash with meaningless research. This immediately leads to the question: ‘What is meaningful historical and theoretical research in film and television studies (and the humanities in general)’? Research begins from known and accepted ideas and moves towards the unknown. The ideas that constitute a discipline are the set of questions to which that discipline provides the answers. Meaningful research develops when new questions arise that generate problems which the known and accepted ideas cannot answer—but which are nonetheless recognized as admissible and appropriate (because solvable) questions. Answers to these new questions have at least two consequences: (1) they extend, revise, and correct (and occasionally overthrow) the known and accepted ideas; and (2) they lead to new questions. What is significant in this seemingly straightforward process of question propagation is that a set of questions eventually emerge that researchers never thought of asking with a discipline’s initial, accepted ideas. Seneca neatly summed up this position when he wrote: ‘A time will come when our posterity will marvel that such obvious things were unknown to us’. One privileged example from science is the Copernican revolution. In 1543 Copernicus posited the now common sense idea that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than vice versa. But at the time this idea was innovative and, according to the Catholic Church, sacrilegious. Advances in film history and theory since the 1970s have produced similar—if less earth shattering—challenges to accepted ideas. The standard film historians, such as Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry, or Terry Ramsaye, never thought, for example,