ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the exploration begun in the last 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 reconsider the organization of shots into a different narrative frame, such as the non linear frame Quentin Tarantino uses in Pulp Fiction (1994). In this chapter we examine 4 stylistic interventions that on one level appear to be a return to former forms, in a sense a creative reaction 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 trying to stretch the boundaries those tendencies may have. We begin with the most conservative of these tendencies, the elevation of cinema verité.
