Content area
Full Text
When applying the spotlight theory of film history, attention is directed from one "golden age" to another, flitting back and forth across Europe, back and forth across the Atlantic, following the cinematic muse as it settles first with one national cinema and then another. This theory is quite serviceable in the writing of cursory film histories, but always raises the problem of specifically delineating each national cin- ema to which the author seeks to attribute greatness. Those who apply this technique most strictly tend to choose movements that are easy to talk about in terms commonly employed In literary analysis. It is a strong thematic quality which unites the Soviet, German, or post-war Italian schools for these writers, and any utilization of editing, design or camerawork is shuffled uncom- fortably to a far corner and discussed as ancillary technique. This is only to be ex- pected, given the state of film historical study and the predilections of many film historians. Occasionally the more daring among them will try to relate the "style" of a particular movement to the "content" of that movement, but seldom will you find any admission that the style is the move- ment, and the way a story is told is the story. Our conditioned vocabularies resist defining a movement in terms of juxtaposition or spacial relationships, and consequently, the only film movements that get generally discussed as movements are those who have a strong and unifying thematic core susceptible to analysis in literary fashion.
When film criticism grew into a more artist-centered format, it was still these thematic values that dominated the conversation. Directors, even such obvious visual stylists as Ophuls or Dreyer; were discussed primarily in terms of the story content of their work, certainly a strange approach for criticism of this most modern of art forms. Recently the grip of directoras-auteur criticism has loosened, and fleeting spotlights of attention have been directed to other participants in the filmmaking process. Last year FILM COMMENT devoted a whole issue to the work of the screenwriter, certainly a fresh approach in the welter of director-centered criticism that has appeared in the past decade, but predictably devoted to a type of filmmaker intimately bound up with story and narrative elements, and thus susceptible...