Everyday Style
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.