Review of Barry Salt’s FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY
From Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 3-4, 1986. –- J.R.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: HISTORY AND ANALYSIS by Barry Salt, Starword, 3 Minford Gardens, London W14 0AN, England, 1983: paper, $ 15.00, 408 pages, lllustrations
Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum
It is a sad commentary on the narrowness and inflexibility of current academic publishing
in film studies that this major work had to be brought out at the author’s own expense.
Handsomely produced and generously priced, Film Style and Technology: History and
Analysis offers what is conceivably the most detailed account of film technology that we
have had to date, stretching from 1885 through the Seventies, with roughly one chapter
per decade, and for this aspect of the book alone, no comprehensive library devoted to
film history can afford to be without it. In addition, the book’s innovative use of statistical
style analysis, while problematical in relation to certain stylistic issues, nevertheless
introduces a new form of rigor to film analysis that deserves to be considered in detail.
If, as a “total” view of cinema, Salt’s approach often seems constricted, it nonetheless
yields a wealth of potentially useful material to many different kinds of film scholars.
As Salt’s title makes clear, a technological history of film represents only one part
of his enterprise. The historical development of film style, seen chiefly through the
historical development of film technology, would be a more accurate definition of
his subject -– an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking — and it is largely here that
Salt has attracted the most controversy. Describing his intellectual position as
Scientific Realism, “[which] can be crudely summarized as the view that there is a
real world, and that this real world is described by the established natural sciences,”
Salt is concerned with establishing an objective precision to his work which is clearly
at odds with both impressionistic criticism and much of the speculative film theory
that has dominated film studies up to the present. The virtual solitude oi Salt in
relationship to the contemporary scene has a lot to do with what makes him
provocative and valuable, regardless of whether or not one sympathizes with his
aims; whatever he’s piping, it’s not the same old tune.
Speaking as a journalist and academic who has often championed self-declared
(as opposed to unacknowledged) subjectivity as a potentially liberating
force — and who tends to value theory, criticism and history alike as material to
be scavenged for possible insights rather than as self-generated activities desirable
as ends in themselves — I approached Salt’s book with some caution and misgivings,
and continue to regard it with a certain ambivalence, in spite of its unquestionable
achievements. Without being qualified to confirm or challenge Salt in most of his
factual assertions, I have a natural suspicion towards any historian who claims to
know the “first” time a particular usage occurs in the cinema, at least when such a
usage is not wholly dependent on a new development in technology, and the
three examples below point to some of the possible confusions that can lead
from such assertions:
As far as using optical printing for reversing action and producing “freeze frames”
is concerned, the important film seems to have been Hollywood (James Cruze,
1923), but a much better-known example where the effects of these techniques
are central to the plot is René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1924 ). These devices,
though continuing to appear intermittently in lighter films, were never used
in serious dramas till the nineteen-sixties. (p. 206)
Michelangelo Antonioni was another film-maker important for his use of long
focal length lenses in ll Deserto Rosso (1964 ) In his case he was interested in
them as a means of producing near-abstract compositions of hard-edged areas
of flat colour, and a large proportion of in ll Deserto Rosso was shot with lenses
of focal length from 100mm upwards. As far back as La Notte (1961), Antonioni
had been creating compositions influenced by the school of “hard-edged” abstract
painting descended from Barnett Newman (an Italian representative was Bruno
Marani), though initially he had done this with standard-lens cinematography.
This was the first time since the nineteen-twenties that the advanced painting
of the recent past had an influence on film image composition. (336)
Cassavetes‘ Shadows was original in that it was created largely through guided
group improvization [sic] , and this has remained Cassavetes’ practice ever since
in his low-budget films… (347)
In each case, Salt begins with a commonsensical assertion that then becomes
problematical as soon as he tries to make too much out of it. The freeze-frames that
occur in such serious dramas as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and at the end of All
About Eve (1950) throw some doubt on the last sentence in the first quotation.
Regarding the last sentence quoted on Antonioni, one doesn’t even need a contrary
example to question whether Salt could possibly assert that over 30 years of
commercial filmmaking, “film image composition” was never — presumably not
even once — influenced by “advanced painting of the recent past.” (How could
any historian claim to know this?) Regarding Cassavetes, further research
would reveal that the practice of group improvisation played a substantial role only
in his first feature; in a recent feature like Love Streams (1984), according to several
accounts, improvisation occurs significantly only in a single scene (Gena Rowlands
trying to amuse her family beside a swimming pool.)
Ironically, it is Salt’s own call for precision that makes such relative imprecisions
stand out. (On the whole, he is a good deal more cautious.) More generally, as a
corrective and challenge to film studies as they are presently constituted, his
methodology is like a strong tonic, and I have few misgivings about Salt’s frontal
assault on fashionable film theories in his first five chapters –- which, according
to his Preface, is what led to his book as a whole being rejected by American
academic press. Unlike he more long-winded and self-regarding disparagements
of Continental theory that have recently become à la page in the more apolitical
reaches of academia (as in the work of David Bordwell and Noel Carroll), Salt’s
objections to many of the same theorists are pithy, pungent and existentially
sound in relation to his own sphere of interest, and there is little sense of
grandstanding in the way that Salt delivers them.
My objections to Salt, then, have little to do with his dismissals of Metz,
Heath, Eco, Althusser, Lacan et al — although one might note in passing that
the refusal of the academic world to deal with his arguments has probably
brought a certain stridency to his tone. What seems more troubling to the
reader is Salt’s overall conception of film style –- a conception that is in
some respects inseparable from his methodology, but in other respects
demands to be viewed quite independently of it. Although Salt never
precisely equates devices, effects and equipment with aesthetic
strategies, his working assumption that style is quantifiable nonetheless
leads him in that general direction, and there are times when he appears
to be more concerned with “styling” (as in the way cars are built –- how
much chrome, the size of the fins, etc.) than with style per se, and more
with equipment and statistics than with art. This is not to deny that his
statistical tables, regarding shots scales, shot durations, reverse angles
and camera movements in large numbers of films are germane to
discussions of style, only to suggest that how and when they are germane
is not a question that is always happily resolved. The facts that, say, Ophuls’
Liebelei (1932) contains 100 pans and that Lola Montès (1955) contains
52 pans, 9 cranes, 54 tracks with pans and tilts, 62 tracks with pans, 19 tracks,
19 pans with tilts, and 8 tilts may or may not be useful, but surely the
pertinence of any one of these camera movements is more important than
any of the above; and it is on questions of pertinence that Salt most often
leaves one hanging.
In the final analysis., then, Salt’s findings mav be more relevant as a checkpoint
against the factual abuses of other scholars than as an aesthetic topography
which is satisfying in its own right. It is fascinating to read Salt’s account of
the method of interior lighting in Godard’s Le petit soldat (1960), and
frustrating to find that in all his detailed accounts of jump-cuts he fails to
mention A bout de souffle (1959) even once. Similarly, to remain in the
chapter on the Sixties which has provided most of the examples here, it is
pleasing to see Tati’s Playtime (1967) acknowledged as the “only film to
begin to develop a new form out of the special properties of 70mm film,”
and infuriating to see Salt short-change this same achievement by coming
up with a reductive and objectively inaccurate description like the following:
Despite the claims made by some people that the separate actions in different
parts of the frame actually involve different simultaneous comic interests, calm
viewing of the film shows that this is not so, and that there is only one point of
narrative or comedy interest going on at any one instant, in just one area of the
frame. The rest of the action is really just background distraction which makes
it a little difficult to find where the main point of interest lies.
Arguably, if “calm viewing” entails a refusal to laugh and a concerted lack
of interest in all narrative detail that detracts from a central thread, Salt’s
misreading might indeed be defensible as Scientific Realism, even if Tati’s
genius gets lost in the shuffle; but what is gained in such an exercise? On a
somewhat related plane, considering the fact that Robert Bresson’s name
doesn’t figure once in Salt’s index, it perhaps isn’t unduly surprising to find
him label Being There (1979) and American Gigolo (1980) as films of
“high artistic ambition”.
But even after airing all these qualms, my description of Salt’s book as
indispensable still, stands. It might sound like a backhanded compliment
to say that this book deserves to be used and consulted as one uses Leonard
Maltin’s TV Movies -– as a cross-reference and source of additional
information rather than as a primary text — but in fact, given the many
practical uses of Maltin, it is nothing of the sort. A Martian who wanted to
learn about the cinema and stumbled upon Film Style and Technology might
be dissuaded by such a book from delving into the subject any further, but any
self-respecting Martian – or film professor – who uses it as a backup source
will be amply rewarded.
