: Six European Directors: Essays on the Meaning of Film Style . Peter Harcourt.

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.

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The Ethical and the Juridical in Reversal of Fortune and Terror’s Advocate

Performing Ethics Through Film Style ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474444002.003.0008 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 105-128

Author(s):

Edward Lamberti

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

English Language ◽

Real Life ◽

The Other ◽

French Language ◽

Legal Systems ◽

The Law ◽

Definition Of ◽

Film Style ◽

Reversal Of Fortune

Chapter 5 considers Barbet Schroeder’s English-language American true-life drama Reversal of Fortune (1990) and his French-language political documentary Terror’s Advocate (2007), two films about lawyers and legal systems. Desmond Manderson refers in his collection Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic (2009) to the ‘mosaic’ of a Levinasian approach to the law, as, sceptical of legal systems but devoted to justice, Emmanuel Levinas posits an ethics that refuses to crystallise into a prescriptive view of how the law should work in respect of the Other. I argue that these two Schroeder films, with their multi-faceted, ‘mosaic-like’ styles and structures, perform this fractured Levinasian refusal to settle on a fixed, simplistic definition of the law’s purpose. I analyse Reversal of Fortune for its multiple story strands and the different visual styles Schroeder deploys to delineate them, along with elements of performance – especially from Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow – that complicate questions of otherness. In discussing the documentary Terror’s Advocate, I draw on Stella Bruzzi’s work on performative documentary (2006) to explore how Schroeder uses film style to perform both the bravado of the film’s protagonist, the real-life criminal lawyer Jacques Vergès, and the Levinasian ‘mosaic’ of the legal situations he surveys.

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Finnish Film Style in the Silent Era

Finnish Cinema ◽

10.1057/978-1-137-57651-4_4 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 51-80

Author(s):

Jaakko Seppälä

Keyword(s):

Film Style ◽

Silent Era

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Introduction

The Art of Pure Cinema ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190889951.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

Bruce Isaacs

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Sound Design ◽

Rear Window ◽

Philosophical Approach ◽

Moving Image ◽

New Hollywood ◽

Mise En Scene ◽

Film Style ◽

The Relationship ◽

Lengthy Discussion

Hitchcock’s clearest articulation of a pure cinema method appears in a lengthy discussion with François Truffaut in 1962. Discussing landmark works such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock frames pure cinema as a philosophical approach to film style. It is both medium-specific and part of a larger narrative describing the evolution of moving image art forms in the twentieth century. The introduction situates the relationship between Hitchcock and his “imitators,” filmmakers who reflexively evolved the pure cinema method. Brian De Palma emerges in the 1970s as the Hitchcockian imitator par excellence, the New Hollywood director who strove to take Hitchcock’s pure cinematic method further in terms of mise en scène, montage, and sound design.

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