The mysterious affair of styles in the age of kine-attractography
(2010) Early Popular Visual Culture — Vol. 8, n° 1, p. 17-30 (2010)
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- Abstract
- In the beginning, the kinematograph was intended to be a simple reproductive device for recording what lay before its lens, whether natural views or artificially arranged scenes. On the one hand were scenes whose unfolding owed nothing to the person recording them, and on the other scenes whose arrangement and unfolding were the responsibility of the camera operator or one of his adjuvants (director, actor, accomplice, stage manager, etc.). There were also occurrences when the camera operator simply filmed passively an artificially arranged scene, as if it were a natural view, before the putting into film - a previously composed work from a different sphere, a different cultural series than kinematography. In each case, the question of style is posed in a distinctly different manner. With kine-attractography, a cultural series that was not yet seen to be an art form, we should ask ourselves from the outset if it is possible to speak of style per se. In other words, as long as kinematography was under the thumb of an apparatus that limited its field of action to the passive recording of scenes external to it, pure and simple, how could style be 'sui-generated'? Doesn't common sense tell us that the style of such films was a borrowed style, a style pre-formatted by the reality to which the scene being filmed already belonged, no matter what it was; a style pre-determined by the cultural series to which the 'package' being filmed belongs? The authors of the present article maintain that there can be no question of a filmic style in the case of merely recording with the camera. At best, we are in the presence of a filmed style.
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Gaudreault, A., & Marion, P. (2010). The mysterious affair of styles in the age of kine-attractography. Early Popular Visual Culture, 8(1), 17-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460650903515905 (Original work published 2010)