From the Cheap Seats

I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘style’ recently, not least because I’ve just re-watched six of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. As you might have read in my previous post, they’ve overwhelmed me somewhat: you don’t write posts that long unless you’re besotted.

Sad to say, I’m not finished yet. That post was originally longer still and to get it down to a length that people might even think about reading, I decided to place the broader considerations on style elsewhere. Here, in fact. If you don’t fancy ploughing through it, well I can hardly blame you: I don’t want you getting eye-strain on my account. Just make sure you buy the Dietrich set and get all these wonderful movies.

Because as I’ve been reminded over these past few days, Sternberg was perhaps the greatest visual stylist that ever there was. His pictures create a unity between lighting, composition, production design and art direction that’s utterly harmonious. There’s no concession to realism but then, how could the real Morocco or China ever hope to match Sternberg’s conception of them? His films are about patterns of light, about set design and about precise camera movements.

Predictably, some have accused them of being ‘style over substance’. It’s an accusation I’ve heard flung about quite often, at a great many directors, but I’m never quite sure what it means. It tells me more about the critic than it does about the filmmaker.

I hate the Cromwellian disapproval of visual beauty implicit within the expression, the implication that films have to fulfil some arbitrary qualification (define ‘substance’) before they can indulge in anything so frivolous as ‘style’. Most of all, I hate the fact it’s one-way traffic: why don’t worthy-but-ponderous films get attacked for putting ‘substance’ over style? We might call it ‘substance’ abuse.

(An aside: I’ve sometimes wondered if I should re-order my DVD collection by placing all my Bresson, Renoir and Bunuel films on a lower shelf and all my DePalma, Argento and now Sternberg films directly above them, so I would literally have ‘style over substance’.)

Anyway, what I haven’t provided so far is a definition of what style actually is. That’s because I haven’t got one. Not yet. I hope it’s something that we’ll work out together over the coming months. But what I do know already is that ‘style’ is something quite distinct from decoration. There are a great many ‘visual’ directors who can’t be rated as great stylists.

Ken Russell gets a lot of love in these parts but what some find ‘outrageous’ and ‘flamboyant’, I find ‘meretricious’ and ‘bombastic’. Likewise, I often wish Terry Gilliam would be less generous with his ostentatious imaginings. And even the great Michael Powell missed the target sometimes: Oh… Rosalinda!! is an unprovoked assault on our eyeballs.

Style got a bad name in the 1980s when directors OD’d on hair gel and blue filters but what do you expect when you ask directors schooled in advertising (and yes, music videos count as advertising) to step up to the crease? More than anything, these directors expose the gulf between the decorators and true stylists. They might be able to create an eye catching image but their work is aesthetically banal, derivative and has aged badly: while Sternberg’s films can blow minds seventy years after they were made, many films barely twenty years old look risible.

This has nothing to do with changing fashions but how they’re used. Films like Manhunter and the (deeply underrated) remake of Breathless are utterly of the 1980s but they still work because they are made by directors who know what they’re doing. Tosh like Less Than Zero shows why filmmaking should be left to the experts. Films like these aren’t style over substance: it’s precisely because there’s no style that they’re quite so bad. I further suggest that future viewers will find a great many of the films directed by this decade’s crop of advertising hacks equally laughable. And as long as they don’t accuse them of being ‘stylish’, they’ll be quite right.

Most of all, I want to argue that true style actually becomes content. Even if the actors were digitally removed from The Scarlet Empress, you’d still have a masterpiece of decadence and perversity because that’s how Sternberg has built it. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s films, the style is indivisible from the effect: Melville is recreating the cinema he loved, distilling its essence down to the purest form which gives his films their characteristic patina.

This to my mind is what makes the great stylists. The visuals aren’t simply overlaid to illustrate or decorate a story. They are fundamental to how a film works.