![]() ![]() He noted that it is in fact unclear what classicism would mean in the context of film studies and, further, that for him the classical was a ‘shorthand description’ carrying ‘no deep commitment to a worldview or an aesthetic’ and it could just as well be called ‘standard’, ‘mainstream’, or simply ‘X’ style. Indeed, Bordwell evokes neoclassical criteria only with respect to a few particular and nuanced arguments, namely with respect to the unities of space, time, and action that typify scene construction in Hollywood films. On a number of later occasions, Bordwell stressed that the idea of classical cinema did not intend to affiliate Hollywood’s dominant style with neoclassicism. Yet, the authors explicitly point at formal principles typical of neoclassical aesthetics as fundamental to how Hollywood came to identify its own style. The particular phrasing here is important: Bordwell & Staiger & Thompson do not claim that American film producers saw in the art of antiquity an aesthetic ideal to emulate in films, and they note that Hollywood’s style is also indebted to ‘nonclassical’ sources such as romantic music or nineteenth-century melodrama. ![]() As they acknowledge, ‘We are not used to calling products of American mass culture classical in any sense.’ Yet they find the term (previously used in French film criticism) appropriate for describing the dominant style of American filmmaking ‘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’. ![]() For Bordwell & Staiger & Thompson, the notion of the classical relies primarily on the scholarly tradition of German art history and is associated, most succinctly, with aesthetic qualities of ‘elegance, unity, rule-governed craftsmanship’. ![]() The nature of the correlation between classical aesthetics and classical Hollywood cinema is complex and indirect, and not only in the eyes of the critics of the concept. The classical cinema debates and film acting This inquiry into discourses on acting, in turn, opens new perspectives on how the classical and the modern functioned in conjunction in shaping and communicating fundamental notions about Hollywood’s aesthetics. These publications partook in the popularisation of certain conceptions of the craft that the emergent Hollywood film industry had allegedly privileged at the time. My exploration of these discourses on acting draws upon a corpus of film-acting guidebooks and manuals that circulated widely among film fans and aspiring performers in the 1910s and 1920s. My focus here is on ideas about film acting that emerged in Hollywood cinema of the silent era, a period that saw the formulation of the principal traits of the so-called classical style.Īs I shall demonstrate, whereas film historiography still lacks a robust conception of what classicism is in film performance, discourses on acting style during the silent era in America continuously alluded, implicitly or explicitly, to classical (or rather, given the period, neoclassical) aesthetic ideas. In this article, I revisit the debates about the notion of classical cinema in order to call attention to its implications on studies of the history of film acting – a subject that has thus far remained in the margins of these debates. These debates have prominently revolved around historiographical questions of style and spectatorship and, more specifically, around the approaches to narrative and editing techniques. Very few concepts in cinema studies have drawn as intense and long-lasting debates as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s formulation of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. ![]()
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