Film form: an argument for a functional theory of style in the individual film - Style in Cinema

The theoretical strength of auteurism is that it connects style with personal style or expressiveness. The auteurist explains the significance of Renoir's deeply-staged, multiplanar compositions in Rules of the Game in terms of his encompassing, compassionate, egalitarian vision - his open-hearted concern for all of his characters as well as his view of the world as bustling, full, complex, and alive.

However, in order to pinpoint the style that is the director, the auteurist's unit of analysis must be the director's oeuvre, or some significant subsegment of it. Otherwise the auteurist cannot be sure that the director hasn't merely donned a mask for a specific film and that what appears as personality isn't just a persona. Thus, the auteurist searches for formal features that recur in the filmmaker's oeuvre; indeed, the auteurist looks especially for those recurring features that differentiate the pertinent filmmaker from other filmmakers. Since what the auteurist hopes to identify is the unique personality of the filmmaker, what the auteurist searches for are the recurring stylistic features or formal mannerisms that make possible the manifest expression of the filmmaker's distinctive mode of being in the world.

This approach, nevertheless, carries with it certain obvious limitations. Inasmuch as significant formal choices in a film are frequently made to implement purposes not germane to other films by the director in question, they may not recur in other works of the filmmaker. For example, in Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder opts for interior shots of Norma Desmond's mansion that emphasize not only that it is large, but empty, at least in the sense of being bereft of people. Its emptiness, of course, underscores that Norma is isolated, that she is alone, with almost no one around her. The world has passed Norma Desmond by.

Wilder's stylistic choice of this way of shooting the interior of the mansion, especially the downstairs environs, answers the problem of the way in which to reinforce a central theme of the film - that everyone has abandoned Norma Desmond - by means of a formal articulation that makes her desolation almost visceral. It is a major formal contribution to the film. But since this use of space does not recur in other films by Wilder, it is likely to be neglected by the auteurist. Furthermore, insofar as this use of space is not particularly distinctive of Wilder - other directors have used vast interior spaces to connote isolation and loneliness - the auteur critic has an additional inclination to overlook Wilder's use of space in Sunset Blvd. Instead, the auteurist will probably pay more attention to the structures of irony that Wilder employs in the film, since irony, especially of a cynical sort, is a recurring feature of Wilder's work.

Emphasizing Wilder's irony in Sunset Blvd., of course, is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. But exclusively using what one knows of Wilder's enduring concerns across his career as the filter for selecting the pertinent stylistic structures in Sunset Blvd. will draw attention away from many of the formal choices Wilder made in order to convey what he intended about Norma Desmond, her plight, and Hollywood culture in general. The project of Sunset Blvd. presented Wilder with various local problems that other stories and other films did not. The solutions to those problems, while determining the formal structures of Sunset Blvd., need not be part of the account of what makes Wilder Wilder. Still they are indispensable contributions to what makes Sunset Blvd. as effective a film as it is. So, if we expect a stylistic analysis of an individual film to help to explain how it works, then auteurism is not enough.