The Classical Hollywood Cinema

Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134988082
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer

'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits

'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times

Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations.

Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing.

The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system.

The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty.

Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

Part One
The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60

DAVID BORDWELL

Neither normative criticisms nor morphological description alone will ever give us a theory of style. I do not know if such a theory is necessary; but if we want one we might do worse than approach artistic solutions in terms of those specifications which are taken for granted in a given period, and to list systematically, and even, if need be, pedantically, the priorities in the reconciliation of conflicting demands. Such a procedure will give us a new respect for the classical but will also open our minds to an appreciation of non-classical solutions representing entirely fresh discoveries.¹

E.H.Gombrich

1
An excessively obvious cinema

We all have a notion of the typical Hollywood film. The very label carries a set of expectations, often apparently obvious, about cinematic form and style. We can define that idea, test and ground those expectations, by using the concept of group style.

Historians routinely speak of group style in other arts: classicism or the Baroque in music, Impressionism or Cubism in painting, Symbolism or Imagism in poetry.¹ Cinema has its own group styles; German Expressionism, Soviet montage cinema, and the French New Wave afford timehonored instances. But to suggest that Hollywood cinema constitutes a group style seems more risky. In other national schools, a handful of filmmakers worked within sharply contained historical circumstances for only a few years. But Hollywood, as an extensive commercial enterprise, included hundreds of filmmakers and thousands of films, and it has existed for over six decades. If it is a daunting challenge to define a German Expressionist cinema or a Neorealist one, it might seem impossible to circumscribe a distinctive Hollywood ‘group style.’

The historical arguments for the existence of such style are examined later in this book. At this point, a prima facie case for a ‘classical Hollywood style’ depends upon critically examining a body of films. Suppose that between 1917 and 1960 a distinct and homogeneous style has dominated American studio filmmaking—a style whose principles remain quite constant across decades, genres, studios, and personnel. My goal here is to identify, at several levels of generality, to what extent Hollywood filmmaking adheres to integral and limited stylistic conventions.

We could start with a description of the Hollywood style derived from Hollywood’s own discourse, that enormous body of statements and assumptions to be found in trade journals, technical manuals, memoirs, and publicity handouts. We would find that the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern, which makes the film studio resemble the monastery’s scriptorium, the site of the transcription and transmission of countless narratives; that unity is a basic attribute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’ in both an Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to historical fact); that the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling; that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional appeal that transcends class and nation. Reiterated tirelessly for at least seventy years, such precepts suggest that Hollywood practitioners recognized themselves as creating a distinct approach to film form and technique that we can justly label ‘classical.’

We are not used to calling products of American mass culture ‘classical’ in any sense; the word apparently comes easier to the French speaker. As early as 1925, a French reviewer described Chaplin’s Pay Day (1922) as a representative of ‘cinematic classicism,’ and a year later Jean Renoir spoke of Chaplin, Lubitsch, and Clarence Brown as contributors to a ‘classical cinema’ of the future, one ‘which owes nothing to tricks, where nothing is left to chance, where the smallest detail takes its place of importance in the overall psychological scheme of the film.’² It was probably André Bazin who gave the adjective the most currency; by 1939, Bazin declared, Hollywood filmmaking had acquired ‘all the characteristics of a classical art.’³ It seems proper to retain the term in English, since the principles which Hollywood claims as its own rely on notions of decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool control of the perceiver’s response—canons which critics in any medium usually call ‘classical.’

To stress this collective and conserving aspect of Hollywood filmmaking also affords a useful counterweight to the individualist emphases of auteur criticism. Bazin criticized his protégés at Cahiers du cinéma by reminding them that the American cinema could not be reduced to an assembly of variegated creators, each armed with a personal vision:⁴

What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition…. The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.

Bazin’s point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor. ‘We said,’ remarked Truffaut bitterly, ‘that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves; what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.’⁵ Pierre Kast agreed: ‘Better a good cinéma de salarie than a bad cinéma d’auteur.’⁶ It is the cinéma de salarie, at least in its enduring aspects, that represents Hollywood’s classicism.

All of which is not to say that Hollywood’s classicism does not have disparate, even ‘nonclassical’ sources. Certainly the Hollywood style seeks effects that owe a good deal to, say, romantic music or nineteenth-century melodrama. Nor do Hollywood’s own assumptions exhaustively account for its practice; the institution’s discourse should not set our agenda for analysis. The point is simply that Hollywood films constitute a fairly coherent aesthetic tradition which sustains individual creation. For the purposes of this book, the label ‘classicism’ serves well because it swiftly conveys distinct aesthetic qualities (elegance, unity, rule-governed craftsmanship) and historical functions (Hollywood’s role as the world’s mainstream film style). Before there are auteurs, there are constraints; before there are deviations, there are norms.

Norms, paradigms, and standards

In the final analysis, we loved the American cinema because the films all resembled each other.

François Truffaut⁷

The first, and crucial, step is to assume that classical filmmaking constitutes an aesthetic system that can characterize salient features of the individual work. The system cannot determine every minute detail of the work, but it isolates preferred practices and sets limits upon invention. The problem is, in other words, that of defining what Jan Muka ovský has called aesthetic norms.

When we think of a norm, especially in a legal sense, we tend to think of a codified and inflexible rule. While Muka ovský recognized that the aesthetic norms of a period are often felt by artists as constraints upon their freedom, he stressed the norms’ comparative flexibility. He argued that the aesthetic norm is characterized by its non-practical nature; the only goal of the aesthetic norm is to permit art works to come into existence. This has important consequences: disobeying the aesthetic norm is not necessarily a negative act (may, indeed, be quite productive); and aesthetic norms can change rapidly and considerably. Muka ovský goes on to inventory several different kinds of norms, all of which intertwine within the art work. There are norms deriving from the materials of the art work. Poetry, for instance, takes language as its material, but language does not come raw to the task; it brings alongs norms of everyday usage. Secondly, there are technical norms, basic craft practices such as metrical schemes and genre conventions. Thirdly, there are practical, or sociopolitical norms; e.g., a character’s ethical values represented in the work. Finally, Muka ovský speaks of aesthetic norms as such, which seem to be the basic principles of artistic construction that form the work. These would include concepts of unity, decorum, novelty, and the like.⁸

Muka ovský’s work helps us move toward denning the Hollywood cinema as an aesthetic system. Plainly, the Hollywood style has functioned historically as a set of norms. It might seem rash to claim that Hollywood’s norms have not drastically changed since around 1920, but Muka ovský points out that periods of ‘classicism’ tend toward harmony and stability. Moreover, the idea of multiple norms impinging upon the same work helps us see that it is unlikely that any Hollywood film will perfectly embody all norms: ‘The interrelations among all these norms, which function as instruments for artistic devices, are too complex, too differentiated, and too unstable for the positive value of the work to be able to appear as virtually identical with the perfect fulfillment of all norms obtaining within it.’⁹ No Hollywood film is the classical system; each is an ‘unstable equilibrium’ of classical norms.

Muka ovský’s work also enables us to anticipate the particular norms which we will encounter. Evidently, classical cinema draws upon practical or ethico-socio-political norms; I shall mention these only when the particular ways of appropriating such norms are characteristic of the classical style. For example, heterosexual romance is one value in American society, but that value takes on an aesthetic function in the classical cinema (as, say, the typical motivation for the principal line of action). Material norms are also present in the cinema; when we speak of the ‘theatrical’ space of early films or of the Renaissance representation of the body as important for classical cinema, we are assuming that cinema has absorbed certain material norms from other media. Similarly, I will spend considerable time examining the technical norms of classical filmmaking, since to a large extent these pervasive and persistent conventions of form, technique, and genre constitute the Hollywood tradition. But in order to understand the underlying logic of the classical mode, we must also study how that mode deploys fundamental aesthetic norms. How, specifically, does Hollywood use such principles as unity and aesthetic function? As all these points indicate, the chief virtue of Muka ovský’s work is to enable us to think of a group film style not as a monolith but as a complex system of specific forces in dynamic interaction.

My emphasis on norms should not be taken to imply an iron-clad technical formula imposed upon filmmakers. Any group style offers a range of alternatives. Classical filmmaking is not, strictly speaking, formulaic; there is always another way to do something. You can light a scene high- or low-key, you can pan or track, you can cut rapidly or seldom. A group style thus establishes what semiologists call a paradigm, a set of elements which can, according to rules, substitute for one another. Thinking of the classical style as a paradigm helps us retain a sense of the choices open to filmmakers within the tradition. At the same time, the style remains a unified system because the paradigm offers bounded alternatives. If you are a classical filmmaker, you cannot light a scene in such a way as to obscure the locale entirely (cf. Godard in Le gai savoir); you cannot pan or track without some narrative or generic motivation; you cannot make every shot one second long (cf. avant-garde works). Both the alternatives and the limitations of the style remain clear if we think of the paradigm as creating functional equivalents: a cut-in may replace a track-in, or color may replace lighting as a way to demarcate volumes, because each device fulfills the same role. Basic principles govern not only the elements in the paradigm but also the ways in which the elements may function.

Our account of this paradigm must also recognize how redundant it is. Not only are individual devices equivalent, but they often appear together. For instance, there are several cues for a flashback in a classical Hollywood film: pensive character attitude, close-up of face, slow dissolve, voice-over narration, sonic ‘flashback,’ music. In any given case, several of these will be used together. In another mode of film practice, such as that of the European ‘art cinema’ of the 1960s, the same general paradigm governs a movement into flashback, but the conventional cues are not so redundant (e.g., pensive close-up but with no music or dissolve). The classical paradigm thus often lets the filmmaker choose how to be redundant, but seldom how redundant to be.

One more conception of Hollywood cinema as a unified system plays a part in understanding the classical style. This book will also refer to a ‘standardized’ film style. In general, this suggests only adherence to norms. But the term also implies that Hollywood cinema has been made stringently uniform by its dependence upon a specific economic mode of film production and consumption. Calling the Hollywood style ‘standardized’ often implies that norms have become recipes, routinely repeating a stereotyped product.

Yet the avant-garde has no monopoly on quality, and violating a norm is not the only way to achieve aesthetic value. I assume that in any art, even those operating within a mass-production system, the art work can achieve value by modifying or skillfully obeying the premises of a dominant style.

Levels of generality

If the classical style is a set of norms, we need a way to distinguish greater and lesser degrees of abstraction in that set. A match-on-action cut is a classical convention; so is the principle of spatial continuity. But the first convention is a particular application of the second. Broadly speaking, we can analyze the classical Hollywood style at three levels.

1. Devices. Many isolated technical elements are characteristic of classical Hollywood cinema: three-point lighting, continuity editing, ‘movie music,’ centered framings, dissolves, etc. Such devices are often what we think of as the ‘Hollywood style’ itself. Yet we cannot stop with simply inventorying these devices.
2. Systems. As members of a paradigm, technical devices achieve significance only when we understand their functions. A dissolve between scenes can convey the passage of time; but so can a cut. To say that the classical Hollywood style ceased to exist when most scenes were linked by cuts is to presume that a style is only the sum of its devices. A style consists not only of recurrent elements but of a set of functions and relations defined for them. These functions and relations are established by a system. For example, one cinematic system involves the construction of represented space. In classical filmmaking, lighting, sound, image composition, and editing all take as one task the articulation of space according to specific principles. It is this systematic quality that makes it possible for one device to do duty for another, or to repeat information conveyed by another. Thus employing a cut to link scenes conforms to one function defined by classical premises; within this paradigm, there must be some cue for a time lapse between scenes, and a cut may do duty for a dissolve (or a swish-pan, or a shot of a clock’s moving hands). The systematic quality of film style also sets limits upon the paradigm; in representing space, for instance, ambiguous camera positions and discontinuous cutting are unlikely to occur because they violate certain principles of the system.
   In this book, we shall assume that any fictional narrative film possesses three systems:
   A system of narrative logic, which depends upon story events and causal relations and parallelisms among them;
   A system of cinematic time; and
   A system of cinematic space.
   A given device may work within any or all of these systems, depending on the functions that the system assigns to the device.¹⁰
3. Re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60
• Part Two The Hollywood mode of production to 1930
• Part Three The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28
• Part Four Film style and technology to 1930
• Part Five The Hollywood mode of production, 1930–60
• Part Six Film style and technology, 1930–60
• Part Seven Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema
• Appendix A The unbiased sample
• Appendix B A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film industry, 1896–1960
• Appendix C Principal structures of the US film industry, 1894–1930
• Appendix D Lighting plots and descriptions
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Photograph credits
• Index