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Approaches to the detailed analysis of film and related questions about interpretations and value are once again being widely debated in film studies. Style and meaning is the first edited collection for many years to focus on these matters. The essays - which include contributions by established film scholars (such as George M. Wilson, V. F. Perkins and Laura Mulvey) and by younger writers in the field - centre on methods of close analysis and ground their discussion in the detail of individual films.
With a common focus on the choices made by filmmakers, the writers explores different aspects of the relationship between textual detail and broader conceptual frameworks. Some chapters examine individual aspects of filmmaking - the long take, cinematography, space and point of view, unreliable narration. Others take up different kinds of questions which are equally crucial to textual analysis and interpretation, including: meaning and value; emotional response; the concept of 'the fictional world'; new technologies and film analysis. The selection of films has been made to reflect not only those areas of film history which traditionally been explored through mise-en-scène criticism, but also areas such as the avant-garde and television drama which have not tended to receives such detailed investigation. In these ways the book conducts a series of dialogues with issues in film study which are specifically provoked by close analysis.
Style and meaning is an important new initiative in the varied literature of film studies. its highly readable collection of analyses and variety of approaches will prove popular on undergraduate courses while providing an invaluable resource for graduate students and teachers of film and media.
‘Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film is a vigorous book which boots us well beyond the old impasse of warring classical vs. modern schools or sensibilities in cinema studies. It does by concentrating carefully on the methodology of stylistic analysis, providing a range of vivid demonstrations – and essentially leaving some of the baggage of the auteurist and thematic legacy at the door.’
Adrian Martin, Screening the Past
Introduction John Gibbs and Douglas Pye
1 Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction
V. F. Perkins
2 From detail to meaning: Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) and cinematic articulation
Jonathan Bignell
3 Narrative and visual pleasures in the The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)
George M. Wilson
4 The Dandy and the Magdalen: interpreting the long take in Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949)
5 Character interiority: space, point of view and performance in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)
Neill Potts
6 Narration, point of view and patterns in the soundtrack of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
Steve Neale
7 Revisiting Preminger: Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and close reading
John Gibbs and John Pye
8 Meaning and value in The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
9 A Hollyswooed art firlm: Liebestraum (Mike Figgis, 1991)
Michael Walker
10 Swimming and sinking: form and meaning in an avant-garde film
Jim Hillier
11 'Knowings one's place': frame-breaking, embarrassment and irony in La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995)
Deborah Thomas
12 'Television aesthetics' and close analysis: style, mood and engagement in Perfect Strangers (Stephen Poliakoff, 2001)
Sarah Cardwell
13 How cinematography creates meaning in Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
Cathy Grennhalgh
14 Motes on teaching film style
Andrew Klevan
15 Repetition and return: textual analysis and Douglas Sirk in the twenty-first century
Laura Mulvey