ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the exploration begun in the previous chapter, which looked at the
tension between style and content and how that tension generates first a distinct voice for
the narrative. This voice is first articulated in the compositional choices and consequently in the organization and orchestration of those images. Style may refer to genre or it may recon-
sider the organization of shots into a different narrative frame, such as the nonlinear frame
Quentin Tarantino uses in Pulp Fiction (1994). In this chapter, we examine four stylistic interventions that on one level appear to be a return to former forms-in a sense, a creative reac-
tion to the radical experience of the nonlinear story. On another level, however, these
interventions represent a deepening of long-evolving tendencies in film narrative. In this sense, they work with the limitations of those tendencies, not so much imitating them as try-
ing to stretch the boundaries those tendencies may have. We begin with the most conserva-
tive of these tendencies, the elevation of cine´ma ve´rite´.
