ABSTRACT
How a historian defines a style class depends upon the proximate mechanisms the historian privileges.1 From these mechanisms, a style’s qualitative parameters or constituent elements, and historical beginnings and endings, are accounted for. Identifying a style depends on a series of complex considerations relating to the nature of artistic intention and agency. Other factors that allow for explanation and periodization include “external,” that is, social, institutional, economic, and technological levers, and “internal” traditions, techniques, and subjects. Remaining only with film, these factors have helped define large-scale group classes like Hollywood classicism, as well as more localized designations like cinema of attractions, Italian neorealism, and the cinéma du look, and individual entities like “early Godard,” “1930s Mizoguchi,” and “Griffith at Biograph.” Each is a style or an episode in a style with distinguishing features and framing dates that are often the subject of principled debate regarding the pertinence of specific kinds of evidence and the appropriate interpretation of this evidence.
