The Classical Hollywood Cinema

The Author
David Bordwell is Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of The
Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (University of California Press, 1981); of Narration in the Fiction Film
(Methuen, 1987), and, with Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Knopf, 1985).
Janet Staiger is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Texas-Austin. She has published articles
in Cinema Journal, Screen, Wide Angle, Film Reader 4, The Velvet Light Trap and other journals.
Kristin Thompson is Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has taught Film
studies there and at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Princeton
University Press, 1981), Export Entertainment (British Film Institute, 1985) and numerous articles on film.
THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD
CINEMA
Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson

London
 Dedicated to

Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Booth, Anita Loos,

Arthur C.Miller, and their many co-workers
in the Hollywood cinema
 First published in 1985
First published as a paperback 1988
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane,
London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of
the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Copyright © David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson 1985
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the publisher,
except for the quotation of brief passages
in criticism
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bordwell, David
The classical Hollywood cinema.
1. Moving-pictures—United States—History
I. Title II. Staiger, Janet
III. Thompson, Kristin
791.43’0973 PN1993.5.U6

ISBN 0-203-35881-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37137-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-00383-0 (Print Edition)
 Contents

Acknowledgments xv
Preface xvi

Part One The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60 1

David Bordwell
1 An excessively obvious cinema 2
2 Story causality and motivation 11
3 Classical narration 23
4 Time in the classical film 42
5 Space in the classical film 50
6 Shot and scene 61
7 The bounds of difference 72

Part Two The Hollywood mode of production to 1930 88

Janet Staiger
8 The Hollywood mode of production: its conditions of existence 89
9 Standardization and differentiation: the reinforcement and dispersion of 98
Hollywood’s practices
10 The director system: management in the first years 200
11 The director-unit system: management of multiple-unit companies after 1909 209
12 The central producer system: centralized management after 1914 216
13 The division and order of production: the subdivision of the work from the first 231
years through the 1920s

Part Three The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28 245

Kristin Thompson
14 From primitive to classical 246
15 The formulation of the classical narrative 265
vi

16 The continuity system 287

17 Classical narrative space and the spectator’s attention 310
18 The stability of the classical approach after 1917 329

Part Four Film style and technology to 1930 473

19 Technology, style and mode of production 474
David Bordwell
and Janet Staiger
20 Initial standardization of the basic technology 497
Kristin Thompson
21 Major technological changes of the 1920s 518
Kristin Thompson
22 The Mazda tests of 1928 532
David Bordwell
23 The introduction of sound 536
David Bordwell

Part Five The Hollywood mode of production, 1930–60 548

Janet Staiger
24 The labor-force, financing and the mode of production 549
25 The producer-unit system: management by specialization after 1931 559
26 The package-unit system: unit management after 1955 571

Part Six Film style and technology, 1930–60 580

David Bordwell
27 Deep-focus cinematography 581
28 Technicolor 593
29 Widescreen processes and stereophonic sound 599

Part Seven Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema 606

David Bordwell
and Janet Staiger
30 Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice 607
31 Alternative modes of film practice 619

Envoi 627
 vii

Appendix A The unbiased sample 629

Appendix B A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film industry, 1896–1960 639
Appendix C Principal structures of the US film industry, 1894–1930 643
Appendix D Lighting plots and descriptions 647
Notes 660
Select bibliography 736
Photograph credits 750
Index 752
 Figures

Between pages 112 and 113

1.1 Bulldog Drummond (1929)
1.2 The Show (1927)
1.3 The Garden of Eden (1928)
2.12.5 Casbah (1948)
2.6 The Fountainhead (1949)
3.1 The Night Holds Terror (1955)
3.2 Code of the Sea (1924)
3.3 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
3.4 The Devil’s Bait (1911)
3.53.7 Partners in Crime (1928)
3.83.13 The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935)
3.143.16 The Caddy (1953)
3.173.20 The Canterville Ghost (1944)
3.21 One Touch of Nature (1917)
3.223.25 The Whip Hand (1951)
3.263.28 King Kong (1933)
4.14.2 Mr. Skeffington (1944)
4.34.5 The King and the Chorus Girl (1937)
5.1 The Caddy (1953)
5.2 The Clodhopper (1917)
5.3 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
5.4 The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.5 Laura (1944)
5.6 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
5.7 A Farewell to Arms (1932)
5.8 Carmen Jones (1954)
5.95.10 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
5.115.14 The Whip Hand (1951)
5.155.16 The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.17 The Royal Pauper (1917)
5.185.19 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
5.20 Victory (1919)
5.21 Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)
5.22 The Three Musketeers (1921)
5.23 Affair m Havana (1957)
5.24 The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
5.25 The Little Foxes (1941)
 ix

5.26 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

5.27 Manhandled (1949)
5.28 Wine of Youth (1924)
5.29 The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
5.30 Dangerous Mission (1954)
5.31 The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
5.32 The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)
5.33 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
5.34 Are Parents People? (1925)
5.35 Manhandled (1949)
5.36 Anthony Adverse (1936)
5.37 La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928)
5.385.39 Trying to Get Arrested (1909)
5.405.41 So This Is Paris (1926)
5.425.43 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)
5.445.45 Not Reconciled (1964)
5.465.47 Play Girl (1941)
5.485.49 Each Dawn I Die (1939)
5.505.53 Mr. Skeffington (1944)
6.16.6 Love and the Law (1919)
6.76.9 The Fountainhead (1949)
6.106.40 Play Girl (1941)
7.1 T-Men (1948)
7.2 Penthouse (1933)
9.1 A newspaper comment, November 1911
9.2 A 1913 advertisement for Atlantis
9.3 American Film releases, 1911
9.4 A 1913 advertisement for The Battle of Waterloo
9.5 A 1911 New York Motion Picture Co. announcement
9.6 A May 1911 advertisement of theater display cases
9.7 A theater display in August 1911
9.8 A September 1911 advertisement
9.9 ‘Little Mary’ [Pickford], January 1911
9.10 Owen Moore and Mary Pickford in October 1911
9.11 Film Supply Company of America advertisement, October 1912
9.12 The officers of the Photoplay Authors’ League in 1915
9.13 The Static Club in 1915
9.14 Clarence E.Sinn’s column for 21 October 1911
11.1 The IMP stock company, February 1911
11.2 Vitagraph’s main studio in Brooklyn, New York, June 1912
11.3 Plans for the Fox Studio, 1919
11.4 Dressing rooms (late 1910s)
11.5 The Lubin Firm, 1912
11.6 New York Motion Picture’s Santa Ynez studio, 1915
11.7 The Lasky studio, 1915
x

11.8 A London street set for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
11.9 A December 1922 Photodramatist article
12.1 The Star Theater (Boston, Mass.), 1911
12.2 The Victoria Theater (Lawrence, Mass.), 1911
12.3 The Liberty Theatre, Los Angeles, 1911
12.4 A 1915 Selig advertisement for The Circular Staircase
12.5 The Rights of Man (1915)
12.6 Advertisement for Dante’s Inferno (1911)
12.7 W.Stephen Bush’s 1911 lectures for Faust and Enoch Arden
12.8 Cast list for The Raiders (1913)
12.9 The scene plot for The Raiders
12.1012.12 Pages from The Raiders’ continuity script
12.13 The Bride of Hate (1916)
12.14 The Bride of Hate’s cast list
12.15 An early proposal for music for The Bride of Hate
12.16 Music cues released in the company’s press sheet for exhibitors
12.17 The accounting page for The Bride of Hate
12.18 Poster for The Bride of Hate
12.19 Script page for Framing Framers (1917)
13.1 The Lasky studio in 1918
13.2 A firm’s production chart, 1918
13.3 Art designer’s sketch (1918)
13.4 Models of sets (1918)
13.5 Sketches for scene painters (1918)
13.6 Miniatures (1918)
15.115.2 The Pickpocket (1903)
15.3 The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)
15.4 The Girl in the Armchair (1912)
15.515.6 The Hired Hand (1918)
15.715.9 A Daughter of Dixie (1911)
15.1015.13 A Race With Time (1913)
15.14 Art backgrounds for inter-titles
15.1515.17 The High Cost of Living (1912)
15.1815.22 The Warning (1914)
15.23 A Tale of Two Cities (1911)
16.116.5 Mantrap (1926)
16.616.7 The Sick Kitten (1903?)
16.8 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
16.1016.11 After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.1216.13 A Tale of Two Cities (1911)
16.1416.16 At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)
16.1716.18 After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.1916.20 Shamus O’Brien (1912)
16.2116.22 The Girl of the Cabaret (1913)
16.2316.24 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
 xi

16.2516.28 The Hired Hand (1918)

16.29 Her First Adventure (1908)
16.3016.31 The Fear (1912)
16.3216.33 Alma’s Champion (1912)
16.3416.35 The Warning (1914)
16.3616.37 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
16.3816.39 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
16.4016.41 A Friendly Marriage (1911)
16.4216.43 Behind the Footlights (1916)
16.4416.45 Love and the Law (1919)
16.4616.47 The Gambler’s Charm (1910)
16.4816.49 The Fear (1912)
16.5016.51 The Girl at the Cupola (1912)
16.5216.53 Weights and Measures (1914)
16.5416.55 The Wishing Ring (1914)
16.5616.60 The Loafer (1911)
16.6116.62 A Comedy of Errors (1913)
16.6316.64 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
16.6516.66 The Wishing Ring (1914)
16.6716.72 Detective Burton’s Triumph (1914)
16.7316.74 Field of Honor (1917)
16.7516.77 The Ghost ofRosie Taylor (1918)
16.7816.79 Victory (1919)
16.8016.81 Mantrap (1926)
17.1 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
17.2 The Loafer (1911)
17.3 A Friendly Marriage (1911)
17.4 The Bandit of Tropico (1912)
17.5 Weights and Measures (1914)
17.6 Love and the Law (1919)
17.7 A Temperamental Wife (1919)
17.8 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
17.9 Faithful (1910)
17.10 The Bells (1913)
17.11 The Girl in the Armchair (1912)
17.12 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
17.13 Rory O’More (1911)
17.14 Outdoor stages at Universal c. 1915
17.15 The Coming of Columbus (1912)
17.16 Production still for The Queen of Sheba (1921)
17.17 Design for The Beloved Rogue (1927)
17.18 A Race With Time (1913)
17.19 Damon and Pythias (1914)
17.20 The Case of Becky (1915)
17.21 Love and the Law (1919)
xii

17.22 The Magician (1926)

17.2317.24 Shamus O’Brien (1912)
17.2517.28 The Clodhopper (1917)
17.29 A 1912 advertisement for The Power of Conscience
17.30 The Loafer (1911)
17.31 The Cheat (1915)
17.32 His Phantom Sweetheart (1915)
17.33 Dolly’s Scoop (1916)
17.34 The Girl of the Golden West (1915)
17.35 Forbidden Paths (Robert Thornby, 1917, Lasky)
17.36 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
17.37 A Cumberland Romance (1920)
17.38 Night Life of New York (1925)
17.39 The Ghost of Rosy Taylor (1918)
17.40 Norma Talmadge c. 1923
17.41 Mr. Billings Spends His Dime (1923)
17.42 Her Code of Honor (1919)
17.4317.45 The Hired Hand (1918)
17.4617.47 At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)
17.4817.50 The Dumb Girl ofPortici (1915)
17.51 The camera elevator used for Hotel Imperial (1926)
17.52 A cutaway set and elevator used for Seventh Heaven (1927)
18.118.4 Code of the Sea (1924)
Sound personnel at RKO, 1931
20.1 Publicity photograph for The Hand of Peril (1916)
20.1 Allan Dwan’s cinematographers at the American Film Co. in 1911
20.3 The Pathé studio model
20.4 A 1920 illustration of the Bell & Howell camera
20.5 Universal newsreel cameraman Normal Alley and his Akeley
20.6 A Paramount Famous Lasky Western on location in the late twenties
20.7 Charles Rosher and Mary Pickford
20.8 Sol Polito and director Albert Roper
20.9 A Mitchell advertisement
20.10 The first Eyemo model
20.11 The New York Biograph Studio in 1909
20.12 An outdoor stage at Essanay in 1912
20.13 A corner of the main outdoor stage at Inceville
20.14 Thomas Ince in the Triangle Studio at Culver City, 1916
20.15 Filming in the Edison studio
20.16 The sunlight arc and its accessories
20.17 Transferring film at the Bloom Laboratory in Hollywood in 1918
21.1 Cinematographer Joe La Shelle
20.2 A film editor at MGM, c. 1928
21.3 The 1918 model Bell & Howell automatic splicer
21.4 Shooting a scene for Duke Steps Out (1929)
 xiii

21.5 D.W.Griffith
21.621.7 Way Down East (1919)
21.8 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
21.9 La Bohème (1926)
21.10 The camera crew for Sparrows (1926)
21.1121.12 Foolish Wives (1922)
21.13 Sparrows (1926)
21.14 Clarence White’s 1905 landscape photograph, ‘Morning’
21.15 ‘Mrs Eugene Meyer’ by Edward Steichen
21.16 Way Down East (1919)
21.17 Foolish Wives (1922)
21.18 ‘Cigarette Girl—A Poster Design’
22.1 Lighting Warners’ Singing Fool (1928)
23.1 Warners’ Vitaphone Studios, Brooklyn (1926)
23.2 Gentlemen of the Press (1929)
23.323.10 The Lights of New York (1928)
23.1123.12 Downstairs (1932)
23.1323.14 The Show (1927)
23.1523.16 Moby Dick (1930)
23.17 Sunny (1930)
23.18 The crane used to film Broadway (1929)
24.1 A 1912 Reliance advertisement
25.1 Two pages from the script for Juarez (1939)
25.2 Scriptwriters for Juarez
25.3 Max Factor’s new building (1929)
25.4 A 1937 make-up chart at Warner Bros
25.5 An optically printed set (1932)
25.6 A November 1939 American Cinematographer article by Byron Haskin
25.7 Warner Bros’ Scientific Research Department (1929)
25.8 The floor plan of the Casbah set for Algiers (1938)
25.9 Several production stills from publicity about Juarez
25.10 Part of Warner Bros’ 1939 staff of cinematographers
27.1 Casbah (1948)
27.2 The Kid Brother (1927)
27.3 Greed (1924)
27.4 The Show (1927)
27.527.6 So This is Paris (1926)
27.727.8 Seventh Heaven (1927)
27.9 Moby Dick (1930)
27.10 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)
27.11 The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
27.12 Each Dawn I Die (1939)
27.13 Bulldog Drummond (1929)
27.14 A Farewell to Arms (1932)
27.15 Anthony Adverse (1936)
xiv

27.16 All That Money Can Buy (1941)

27.17 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
27.18 Our Town (1940)
27.19 Kings Row (1941)
27.20 Drawing for Alibi (1929)
27.21 Jezebel (1938)
27.22 Arrowsmith (1931)
27.2327.24 Our Town (1940)
27.25 Filming Ball of Fire (1941)
27.26 Dead End (1937)
27.2727.28 These Three (1936)
27.29 Dead End (1937)
27.30 The Long Voyage Home (1940)
27.31 Dead End (1937)
27.32 Dead End (1937)
27.33 The Long Voyage Home (1940)
27.34 Citizen Kane (1941)
27.35 T-Men (1948)
27.36 Gun Crazy (1949)
27.37 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
27.3827.39 Kings Row (1941)
27.40 Ball of Fire (1941)
27.41 The Little Foxes (1941)
27.42 Manhandled (1949)
27.4327.46 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
28.1 At Sword’s Point (1952)
28.2 The Goldwyn Follies (1938)
29.1 Filming Oklahoma! (1955)
29.2 Carmen Jones (1954)
29.3 Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957)
29.4 Not Reconciled (1964)
29.529.11 River of No Return (1954)
29.12 Pierrot le fou (1964)
 Acknowledgments

We thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Communication Arts Department, and the University of Delaware Department of English for financial
support of this research. Several libraries, archives, and film distributors helped immeasurably: the Museum
of Modern Art, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, the George S. Amberg Film Study Center
at New York University, the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the
Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Cleveland Public Library, the National Film Archive, the Danish
Film Archive, the UCLA Theatre Arts collection, the UCLA Film Archive, the Margaret Herrick Library at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute Library, the American
Society of Cinematographers, the Eastman Kodak Research Library, Macmillan Audio-Brandon, and Films,
Inc.
We also thank the many friends and colleagues who aided us in our work; these include Jeanne Allen,
J.Dudley Andrew, David Armitage, Tino Balio, Dana Benelli, Jane and Berney Berninghausen, Edward
Branigan, Mike Budd, Elaine Burrows, Keith Cohen, Mary Corliss, Michael Drozewski, Thomas Elsaesser,
Maxine Fleckner, Douglas Gromery, Ron Gottesman, Rob and Kit Hume, Robert C.Hummel, Roberta
Kimmel, Barbara Klinger, Jay Leyda, William Luhr, Russell Merritt, Judith Milhaus, Charles Musser, Al
P.Nelson, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Rodney Recor, David Rodowick, Bob Rosen, Phil Rosen, Paul Sandro,
Peter Schofer, Robert Self, Emily Sieger, Charles Silver, Three Tyler, Marc Wanamaker, and Alan
Williams.
We are particularly grateful for the kindness of Charles G.Clarke, Stanley Cortez, Linwood Dunn,
William K.Everson, William Hornbeck, Sidney P.Solow, and Karl and Ethel Struss, and for the patience of
Peter Staiger.
 Preface

Hollywood as the dream factory: ‘How can you tell if people would want drugs so much today, if we still
gave them this dream-world on film?’ (Ruth Waterbury). Hollywood as an arm of the culture industry: ‘The
tone adopted by every film is that of the witch handing food to the child she wants to enchant or devour,
while mumbling horribly: “Lovely, lovely soup. How you’re going to enjoy it!”’ (T.W.Adorno). Hollywood
as celluloid imperialism: ‘Hollywood may be physically situated in this country, but it is an international
enterprise.’ (Will H.Hays). Hollywood as escape: ‘All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you
lack in your daily life are in— Pictures.’ (Advertisement for a film). Hollywood as nostalgia: ‘Take a good
look, because we’ll never see its like again.’ (That’s Entertainment!). Hollywood as imaginary landscape:
‘Hollywood is a place you can’t geographically define. We don’t really know where it is.’ (John Ford).1
The number of books promulgating all these versions of Hollywood (and more) would fill the library of a
small town in America. Hollywood has been celebrated by cultists and camp followers, castigated by
reformers and social theorists, and boosted by an army of publicists. Anthropologists have treated it as a
tribal village, economists as a company town. The films of Hollywood have been lumped together as
indistinguishable vulgarity, and they have been splintered into a hundred categories: the films of Garbo, of
Goldwyn, of Griffith; the Paramount pretties, automobiles in the cinema, the gangster film, the serial, music
for the movies; direction by Alfred Hitchcock, costumes by Edith Head, cinematography by Gregg Toland,
sets by Van Nest Polglase; silent films, sound films, color films, films noirs.
Yet another treatment of the subject requires some justification. This book is an examination of
Hollywood cinema as a distinct artistic and economic phenomenon. We will look at American studio
filmmaking much as an art historian would trace the stylistic traits and business transactions of Parisian
academic painting in the nineteenth century, or as a historian of music would examine the aesthetic and
economic forces involved in the development of Viennese classicism. We take Hollywood seriously,
treating it as a distinct mode of film practice with its own cinematic style and industrial conditions of
existence.
A mode of film practice is not reducible to an oeuvre (the films of Frank Capra), a genre (the Western),
or an economic category (RKO films). It is an altogether different category, cutting across careers, genres,
and studios. It is, most simply, a context. And we cannot arrive at this context simply by adding up all the
histories of directors, genres, studios, producers, etc.; this would be, as George Kubler suggests, like trying
to determine a country’s network of railroads by studying the itinerary of every traveler.2 Just as the railroad
system is of another logical order than your or my trip on it, so the Hollywood mode of film practice
constitutes an integral system, including persons and groups but also rules, films, machinery, documents,
institutions, work processes, and theoretical concepts. It is this totality that we shall study. And while we
could justify this book as filling in the background for this or that individual’s achievement, our aims go
 xvii

further. We hope to show that understanding this mode of film practice is indispensible to a full grasp of the
art and industry of cinema as it has existed in history.
Recent academic film criticism has focused more and more exclusively upon the text. Sophisticated
methodologies drawn from anthropology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism have
dramatically broadened our sense of how a film works. But too often critical analysis has been unable to
specify the historical conditions that have controlled and shaped textual processes.3 On the other hand, the new
generation of film historians, while an exciting development, has generally avoiding confronting the films
themselves.4 Detailed accounts of Hollywood financing, labor, distribution, exhibition, and technology have
not usually sought to link economic factors to stylistic ones. In this book, we show how the concept of a
mode of film practice can historicize textual analysis and connect the history of film style to the history of
the motion picture industry.
The concept of a mode of film practice situates textual processes in their most pertinent and proximate
collective context. This context includes both a historically defined group of films and the material practices
that create and sustain that group. Raymond Williams has posed the problem:5

We have to break from the common procedure of isolating an object and then discovering its
components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions….
The recognition of the relation of a collective mode and an individual product— and these are the
only categories we can initially presume—is a recognition of related practices. That is to say, the
irreducibly individual projects that particular works are, may come in experience and analysis to show
resemblances which allow us to group them into collective modes. These are by no means always
genres. They may exist as resemblances within and across genres. They may be the practice of a
group in a period, rather than the practice of a phase in a genre. But as we discover the nature of a
particular practice, and the nature of the relation between an individual product and a collective mode,
we find that we are analyzing, as two forms of the same process, both its active composition and its
conditions of composition, and in either direction this is a complex of extending active relationships.

For the Hollywood cinema, the practices of film production constitute a major component of that process of
which Williams speaks. Film production must be understood not simply as a background to individual
achievement but as a crucial ‘condition of composition’ of resemblances among texts. The ways that films are
conceived, planned, and produced leave their marks upon the films— not only directly, in telltale details, but
structurally as well.6 At the same time, stylistic aims have shaped the development of the mode of
production. The relations between film style and mode of production are, we argue, reciprocal and mutually
influencing.
A mode of film practice, then, consists of a set of widely held stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining
an integral mode of film production. Those norms constitute a determinate set of assumptions about how a
movie should behave, about what stories it properly tells and how it should tell them, about the range and
functions of film technique, and about the activities of the spectator. These formal and stylistic norms will
be created, shaped, and supported within a mode of film production—a characteristic ensemble of economic
aims, a specific division of labor, and particular ways of conceiving and executing the work of filmmaking.
Through time, both the norms and the mode of production will change, as will the technology they employ,
but certain fundamental aspects will remain constant. Thus to see Hollywood filmmaking from 1917–60 as
a unified mode of film practice is to argue for a coherent system whereby aesthetic norms and the mode of
film production reinforced one another. This argument is the basis of this book.
xviii

If we have taken the realms of style and production as primary, it is not because we consider the concrete
conditions of reception unimportant. Certainly conditions of consumption form a part of any mode of film
practice. An adequate history of the reception of the classical Hollywood film would have to examine the
changing theater situation, the history of publicity, and the role of social class, aesthetic tradition, and
ideology in constituting the audience. This history, as yet unwritten, would require another book, probably
one as long as this. While we have not treated reception fully, the present book does introduce certain issues
—e.g., the activities which the Hollywood film solicits from the spectator, or the importance of early
advertising in establishing classical canons— which we believe to be necessary to any future study of how
the classical film has been consumed under specific circumstances.
As a historical account, our argument makes use of a great deal of empirical data about filmmaking,
including much information not previously brought to light. But we should stress that the concept of a mode
of film practice is not one that can be retrieved by ‘simply looking’ at films, documents, and machines. For
rhetorical purposes, our argument is cast chronologically, but the idea of a ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ is
ultimately a theoretical construct, and as such it must be judged by criteria of logical rigor and instrumental
value. This book thus stands out not only as a history of the Hollywood cinema but also as an attempt to
articulate a theoretical approach to film history.
There are many ways to organize a study such as this one. It would be possible to trace the history of the
Hollywood cinema three times— once recounting changes in the mode of production, then treating changes
in film style, then tracing technological developments. This we rejected, since the length of the three
sections would be likely to break apart the parallels and causal connections we wished to bring out among
the three realms. And placing one realm, such as the mode of production, first might imply that it had a
monolithic determining status. But another alternative, that of simply limning a chronological account of
American cinema and raising each argument seriatim, was clearly too atomistic. It would not allow us to
treat broad institutional and stylistic patterns in a systematic way. We finally settled upon a format which
permits us to delineate theoretically distinct realms while still weaving our arguments into a fundamentally
chronological pattern. Our seven-part structure is a compromise between the need to analyze several
‘levels’ of historical change (style, economics, technology) and the need to cut ‘vertically’ across those
levels at moments in which significant changes occurred. In this way, we balance localized accounts and
generalized explanation. The book should then be seen as outlining the fundamental principles of historical
stability and change at work in the Hollywood cinema and as displaying those principles in detail in
particular instances.
The result can be sketched out in broad strokes. Part One establishes the stylistic norms fundamental to
Hollywood filmmaking from 1917 to 1960. It is here that the concepts of norm, function, and style are
defined and the ordinary Hollywood film is analyzed.
In Parts Two, Three, and Four, we consider three aspects of pre-1930 Hollywood filmmaking: the
economic, the stylistic, and the technological. Part Two examines the economic aims and principles of the
Hollywood mode of production and traces how that mode created a series of hierarchical, divided work
systems. Part Three shows that while the Hollywood mode of production found its definitive form, the
stylistic norms were also becoming consolidated. Part Four shows how the norms and the mode of
production impell and respond to technological change.
Parts Five and Six deal with developments in the classical Hollywood cinema in the sound era. Part Five
examines the effects of organized labor and large-scale financing upon the mode of production and traces
further changes in production processes during the period. Part Six relates developments in technology to
changes in film style during the same years.
 xix

Part Seven suggests the historical influences and the current state of this mode of film practice and
concludes with some consideration of alternative modes.
This book has had its own stylistic norms and its own mode of production. Although parts and chapters
are the work of single authors, we have conceived and executed the book as a unified argument, sharing
common assumptions and terminology. We have not, however, striven for complete homogeneity.
Differences of emphasis, value, argument, and style thus remain to remind the reader that the forms of the
medium and the division of labor leave their marks, for better or worse, upon any cultural artifact.
 Part One

The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60

DAVID BORDWELL

Neither normative criticisms nor morphological description alone will ever give us a theory of
style. I do not know if such a theory is necessary; but if we want one we might do worse than
approach artistic solutions in terms of those specifications which are taken for granted in a given
period, and to list systematically, and even, if need be, pedantically, the priorities in the
reconciliation of conflicting demands. Such a procedure will give us a new respect for the
classical but will also open our minds to an appreciation of non-classical solutions representing
entirely fresh discoveries.1
E.H.Gombrich
 1
An excessively obvious cinema

We all have a notion of the typical Hollywood film. The very label carries a set of expectations, often
apparently obvious, about cinematic form and style. We can define that idea, test and ground those
expectations, by using the concept of group style.
Historians routinely speak of group style in other arts: classicism or the Baroque in music, Impressionism
or Cubism in painting, Symbolism or Imagism in poetry.1 Cinema has its own group styles; German
Expressionism, Soviet montage cinema, and the French New Wave afford timehonored instances. But to
suggest that Hollywood cinema constitutes a group style seems more risky. In other national schools, a
handful of filmmakers worked within sharply contained historical circumstances for only a few years. But
Hollywood, as an extensive commercial enterprise, included hundreds of filmmakers and thousands of
films, and it has existed for over six decades. If it is a daunting challenge to define a German Expressionist
cinema or a Neorealist one, it might seem impossible to circumscribe a distinctive Hollywood ‘group style.’
The historical arguments for the existence of such style are examined later in this book. At this point, a
prima facie case for a ‘classical Hollywood style’ depends upon critically examining a body of films.
Suppose that between 1917 and 1960 a distinct and homogeneous style has dominated American studio
filmmaking—a style whose principles remain quite constant across decades, genres, studios, and personnel.
My goal here is to identify, at several levels of generality, to what extent Hollywood filmmaking adheres to
integral and limited stylistic conventions.
We could start with a description of the Hollywood style derived from Hollywood’s own discourse, that
enormous body of statements and assumptions to be found in trade journals, technical manuals, memoirs,
and publicity handouts. We would find that the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set
stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern, which makes the
film studio resemble the monastery’s scriptorium, the site of the transcription and transmission of countless
narratives; that unity is a basic attribute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’ in both
an Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to historical fact); that the
Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling;
that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional
appeal that transcends class and nation. Reiterated tirelessly for at least seventy years, such precepts suggest
that Hollywood practitioners recognized themselves as creating a distinct approach to film form and
technique that we can justly label ‘classical.’
We are not used to calling products of American mass culture ‘classical’ in any sense; the word
apparently comes easier to the French speaker. As early as 1925, a French reviewer described Chaplin’s Pay
Day (1922) as a representative of ‘cinematic classicism,’ and a year later Jean Renoir spoke of Chaplin,
Lubitsch, and Clarence Brown as contributors to a ‘classical cinema’ of the future, one ‘which owes nothing
 AN EXCESSIVELY OBVIOUS CINEMA 3

to tricks, where nothing is left to chance, where the smallest detail takes its place of importance in the
overall psychological scheme of the film.’2 It was probably André Bazin who gave the adjective the most
currency; by 1939, Bazin declared, Hollywood filmmaking had acquired ‘all the characteristics of a classical
art.’3 It seems proper to retain the term in English, 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.’
To stress this collective and conserving aspect of Hollywood filmmaking also affords a useful
counterweight to the individualist emphases of auteur criticism. Bazin criticized his protégés at Cahiers du
cinéma by reminding them that the American cinema could not be reduced to an assembly of variegated
creators, each armed with a personal vision:4

What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of
certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition…. The
American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only
the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous
tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.

Bazin’s point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of
the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor.
‘We said,’ remarked Truffaut bitterly, ‘that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves;
what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.’5 Pierre Kast
agreed: ‘Better a good cinéma de salarie than a bad cinéma d’auteur.’6 It is the cinéma de salarie, at least in
its enduring aspects, that represents Hollywood’s classicism.
All of which is not to say that Hollywood’s classicism does not have disparate, even ‘nonclassical’
sources. Certainly the Hollywood style seeks effects that owe a good deal to, say, romantic music or
nineteenth-century melodrama. Nor do Hollywood’s own assumptions exhaustively account for its practice;
the institution’s discourse should not set our agenda for analysis. The point is simply that Hollywood films
constitute a fairly coherent aesthetic tradition which sustains individual creation. For the purposes of this
book, the label ‘classicism’ serves well because it swiftly conveys distinct aesthetic qualities (elegance,
unity, rule-governed craftsmanship) and historical functions (Hollywood’s role as the world’s mainstream
film style). Before there are auteurs, there are constraints; before there are deviations, there are norms.

Norms, paradigms, and standards

In the final analysis, we loved the American cinema because the films all resembled each other.
François Truffaut7

The first, and crucial, step is to assume that classical filmmaking constitutes an aesthetic system that can
characterize salient features of the individual work. The system cannot determine every minute detail of the
work, but it isolates preferred practices and sets limits upon invention. The problem is, in other words, that
of defining what Jan Mukařovský has called aesthetic norms.
When we think of a norm, especially in a legal sense, we tend to think of a codified and inflexible rule.
While Mukařovský recognized that the aesthetic norms of a period are often felt by artists as constraints
upon their freedom, he stressed the norms’ comparative flexibility. He argued that the aesthetic norm is
4 THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60

characterized by its non-practical nature; the only goal of the aesthetic norm is to permit art works to come
into existence. This has important consequences: disobeying the aesthetic norm is not necessarily a negative
act (may, indeed, be quite productive); and aesthetic norms can change rapidly and considerably.
Mukařovský goes on to inventory several different kinds of norms, all of which intertwine within the art
work. There are norms deriving from the materials of the art work. Poetry, for instance, takes language as
its material, but language does not come raw to the task; it brings alongs norms of everyday usage.
Secondly, there are technical norms, basic craft practices such as metrical schemes and genre conventions.
Thirdly, there are practical, or sociopolitical norms; e.g., a character’s ethical values represented in the
work. Finally, Mukařovský speaks of aesthetic norms as such, which seem to be the basic principles of
artistic construction that form the work. These would include concepts of unity, decorum, novelty, and the
like.8
Mukařovský’s work helps us move toward denning the Hollywood cinema as an aesthetic system. Plainly,
the Hollywood style has functioned historically as a set of norms. It might seem rash to claim that
Hollywood’s norms have not drastically changed since around 1920, but Mukařovský points out that
periods of ‘classicism’ tend toward harmony and stability. Moreover, the idea of multiple norms impinging
upon the same work helps us see that it is unlikely that any Hollywood film will perfectly embody all
norms: ‘The interrelations among all these norms, which function as instruments for artistic devices, are too
complex, too differentiated, and too unstable for the positive value of the work to be able to appear as virtually
identical with the perfect fulfillment of all norms obtaining within it.’9 No Hollywood film is the classical
system; each is an ‘unstable equilibrium’ of classical norms.
Mukařovský’s work also enables us to anticipate the particular norms which we will encounter. Evidently,
classical cinema draws upon practical or ethico-socio-political norms; I shall mention these only when the
particular ways of appropriating such norms are characteristic of the classical style. For example,
heterosexual romance is one value in American society, but that value takes on an aesthetic function in the
classical cinema (as, say, the typical motivation for the principal line of action). Material norms are also
present in the cinema; when we speak of the ‘theatrical’ space of early films or of the Renaissance
representation of the body as important for classical cinema, we are assuming that cinema has absorbed
certain material norms from other media. Similarly, I will spend considerable time examining the technical
norms of classical filmmaking, since to a large extent these pervasive and persistent conventions of form,
technique, and genre constitute the Hollywood tradition. But in order to understand the underlying logic of
the classical mode, we must also study how that mode deploys fundamental aesthetic norms. How,
specifically, does Hollywood use such principles as unity and aesthetic function? As all these points
indicate, the chief virtue of Mukařovský’s work is to enable us to think of a group film style not as a
monolith but as a complex system of specific forces in dynamic interaction.
My emphasis on norms should not be taken to imply an iron-clad technical formula imposed upon
filmmakers. Any group style offers a range of alternatives. Classical filmmaking is not, strictly speaking,
formulaic; there is always another way to do something. You can light a scene high- or low-key, you can
pan or track, you can cut rapidly or seldom. A group style thus establishes what semiologists call a
paradigm, a set of elements which can, according to rules, substitute for one another. Thinking of the
classical style as a paradigm helps us retain a sense of the choices open to filmmakers within the tradition.
At the same time, the style remains a unified system because the paradigm offers bounded alternatives. If
you are a classical filmmaker, you cannot light a scene in such a way as to obscure the locale entirely (cf.
Godard in Le gai savoir); you cannot pan or track without some narrative or generic motivation; you cannot
make every shot one second long (cf. avant-garde works). Both the alternatives and the limitations of the
style remain clear if we think of the paradigm as creating functional equivalents: a cut-in may replace a
 AN EXCESSIVELY OBVIOUS CINEMA 5

track-in, or color may replace lighting as a way to demarcate volumes, because each device fulfills the same
role. Basic principles govern not only the elements in the paradigm but also the ways in which the elements
may function.
Our account of this paradigm must also recognize how redundant it is. Not only are individual devices
equivalent, but they often appear together. For instance, there are several cues for a flashback in a classical
Hollywood film: pensive character attitude, close-up of face, slow dissolve, voice-over narration, sonic
‘flashback,’ music. In any given case, several of these will be used together. In another mode of film
practice, such as that of the European ‘art cinema’ of the 1960s, the same general paradigm governs a
movement into flashback, but the conventional cues are not so redundant (e.g., pensive close-up but with no
music or dissolve). The classical paradigm thus often lets the filmmaker choose how to be redundant, but
seldom how redundant to be.
One more conception of Hollywood cinema as a unified system plays a part in understanding the
classical style. This book will also refer to a ‘standardized’ film style. In general, this suggests only
adherence to norms. But the term also implies that Hollywood cinema has been made stringently uniform by
its dependence upon a specific economic mode of film production and consumption. Calling the Hollywood
style ‘standardized’ often implies that norms have become recipes, routinely repeating a stereotyped
product.
Yet the avant-garde has no monopoly on quality, and violating a norm is not the only way to achieve
aesthetic value. I assume that in any art, even those operating within a mass-production system, the art work
can achieve value by modifying or skillfully obeying the premises of a dominant style.

Levels of generality
If the classical style is a set of norms, we need a way to distinguish greater and lesser degrees of abstraction
in that set. A match-on-action cut is a classical convention; so is the principle of spatial continuity. But the
first convention is a particular application of the second. Broadly speaking, we can analyze the classical
Hollywood style at three levels.

1 Devices. Many isolated technical elements are characteristic of classical Hollywood cinema: three-
point lighting, continuity editing, ‘movie music,’ centered framings, dissolves, etc. Such devices are
often what we think of as the ‘Hollywood style’ itself. Yet we cannot stop with simply inventorying
these devices.
2 Systems. As members of a paradigm, technical devices achieve significance only when we understand
their functions. A dissolve between scenes can convey the passage of time; but so can a cut. To say that
the classical Hollywood style ceased to exist when most scenes were linked by cuts is to presume that a
style is only the sum of its devices. A style consists not only of recurrent elements but of a set of
functions and relations defined for them. These functions and relations are established by a system. For
example, one cinematic system involves the construction of represented space. In classical filmmaking,
lighting, sound, image composition, and editing all take as one task the articulation of space according
to specific principles. It is this systematic quality that makes it possible for one device to do duty for
another, or to repeat information conveyed by another. Thus employing a cut to link scenes conforms to
one function defined by classical premises; within this paradigm, there must be some cue for a time
lapse between scenes, and a cut may do duty for a dissolve (or a swish-pan, or a shot of a clock’s
moving hands). The systematic quality of film style also sets limits upon the paradigm; in representing
6 THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60

space, for instance, ambiguous camera positions and discontinuous cutting are unlikely to occur
because they violate certain principles of the system.
In this book, we shall assume that any fictional narrative film possesses three systems:
A system of narrative logic, which depends upon story events and causal relations and parallelisms
among them;
A system of cinematic time; and
A system of cinematic space.
A given device may work within any or all of these systems, depending on the functions that the
system assigns to the device.10
3 Relations of systems. If systems are relations among elements, the total style can be defined as the
relation of those systems to each other. Narrative logic, time, and space interact with one another. Does
one of them subordinate the others? Do all three operate independently? How are the principles of one
justified or challenged by another? In the Hollywood style, the systems do not play equal roles: space
and time are almost invariably made vehicles for narrative causality. Moreover, specific principles
govern that process. At this level, even irregularities in the various systems can be seen as purposeful.
For instance, if we do find a passage of discontinuous cutting, we can ask whether it is still serving a
narrative function (e.g., to convey a sudden, shocking event). In such a case, the relation among
systems would remain consistent even if the individual device or system varied from normal usage.

We can, then, characterize the classical Hollywood style by its stylistic elements, by its stylistic systems,
and, most abstractly, by the relations it sets up among those systems. No single level of description will
work. It is too narrow to define classical norms by devices, and it is unwarrantably broad to define them
solely by relations among systems. (The domination of narrative logic over cinematic time and space is
common to many styles.) Hence the importance of the second level, the stylistic systems. The categories of
causality, time, and space enable us both to place individual devices within functional contexts and to see
the classical style as a dynamic interplay of several principles. Finally, no categorical explanation of one
level can wholly swallow up another. The systematic principle of depicting space unambiguously does not
logically entail the use of three-point lighting. Those specific devices are the products of diverse historical
processes; other elements might do as well. The specificity of the classical style depends upon all three
levels of generality.
My account here will construct the classical stylistic paradigm across several decades, emphasizing the
continuity at the second and third levels. But by stressing continuity of function I do not imply that the
systems’ paradigmatic range did not change somewhat. For example, before the mid-1920s, the use of high
and low angles was severely codified: for long-shots (especially of landscapes), for optical point-of-view, or
for shot/reverse-shot patterns when one person is higher than other. (In shot/ reverse-shot editing, an image
of one element in the scene, typically a person talking, is followed by a shot of another element which is
spatially opposite the first, typically, a person listening. Chapter 5 furnishes a more systematic explanation.
See the examples in figs 16.65 and 16.66 in Chapter 16.) A medium-shot of an object or a human figure
would seldom be framed from a sharp high- or low-angle. Yet in the late 1920s, Hollywood’s spatial
paradigm widened a bit, probably as a result of the influence of certain German films. Examples can be
found in Bulldog Drummond (1929) and *The Show (1927), which dramatically use high and low angles
(see figs 1.1 and 1.2). With the coming of sound, an occasional odd angle could compensate for what was
felt to be an excessively ‘theatrical’ scene (see fig 1.3). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, steep angles took
their place as common functional equivalents for normal framings in many situations. Across history, the
 AN EXCESSIVELY OBVIOUS CINEMA 7

paradigm develops chiefly through changes in the first level of analysis—that of devices. This process will
be examined in detail in Parts Three, Four, and Six.

Viewers, schemata, and mental sets

Considering the classical cinema as a system of norms operating at different levels of generality can seem to
create a reified object, a colossal block of attributes that says little about how film viewers see films. The
language of objectivism is hard to avoid, especially when we apply spatial metaphors like ‘levels.’ How,
then, are we to characterize the viewer’s work, or what E.H. Gombrich calls ‘the beholder’s share’?
An intricate and comprehensive theory of film viewing has yet to be constructed, and it is not within the
scope of this book to do it. Yet if we want to consider how the Hollywood film solicits a specific way of
being understood, we need to recognize at least how passive an ‘illusionist’ theory makes the spectator.
Illusionist theorists usually insist that only avant-garde texts make the viewer perform an ‘active’ reading,
or force the viewer to ‘work to produce meaning.’11 The Hollywood spectator, it is claimed, is little more
than a receptacle; few skills of attention, memory, discrimination, inference-drawing, or hypothesistesting
are required. Now this is clearly too simple. Classical films call forth activities on the part of the spectator.
These activities may be highly standardized and comparatively easy to learn, but we cannot assume that
they are simple.
Consider, as one problem, the spectator as perceiver. Illusionist theory emphasizes the deceptive quality
of projected movement or of shot space: the spectator is duped into taking image for reality. As Noël Burch
puts it, ‘spectators experience the diegetic world as environment.’12 But recent explorations in aesthetic
perception and cognition have shown that ‘illusion’ is not simply a matter of fooling the eye. The spectator
participates in creating the illusion. R.L.Gregory, for instance, speaks of perception as inferential, which
makes ‘illusion’ dependent upon errors of inference: either biological ‘mechanism’ errors (e.g., the phi
phenomenon as creating the illusion of movement) or cognitive ‘strategy’ errors (e.g., assuming that the
whole is consistent with displayed parts). Gombrich has also shown that visual illusion demands that the
spectator propose, test, and discard perceptual hypotheses based on expectation and probability.13 For
illusion to work, the spectator must meet the art work at least half way.
If perceptual illusion requires some spectatorial activity, even more is required for that imaginative
involvement solicited by narrative. No story tells all. Meir Sternberg characterizes following a tale as ‘gap-
filling,’ and just as we project motion on to a succession of frames, so we form hypotheses, make
inferences, erect expectations, and draw conclusions about the film’s characters and actions.14 Again, the
spectator must cooperate in fulfilling the film’s form. It is clear that the protocols which control this activity
derive from the system of norms operating in the classical style. For example, an insistence upon the
primacy of narrative causality is a general feature of the classical system; the viewer translates this norm
into a tacit strategy for spotting the work’s unifying features, distinguishing significant information from
‘noise,’ sorting the film’s stimuli into the most comprehensive pattern.
Gombrich describes this process in terms of ‘schemata’ and ‘mental sets.’ Schemata are traditional
formal patterns for rendering subject matter. Gombrich points out that the artist cannot simply copy reality;
the artist can only render the model in terms of one schema or another. Thus even new shapes will be
assimilated to categories which the artist has learned to handle. As Gombrich puts it, ‘making precedes
matching’—the creation of a schema precedes copying the model.15 After the making, the schema can be
modified in each particular case by the artist’s purpose (usually, the sort of information the artist wants to
convey). So far, much of this is congruent with Mukařovský’s argument: we might think of the artist’s
schemata as technical norms and the artist’s purpose as involving specific aesthetic norms. But Gombrich
8 THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60

goes on to show that the schemata and the purpose function for the viewer as well. The artist’s training is
paralleled by the spectator’s prior experience of the visual world and, especially, of other art works. The
painter’s traditional schemata constitute the basis of the viewer’s expectations or mental set: ‘A style, like a
culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set, which registers deviations and
modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.’16 For Gombrich, this mental set is defined in terms of
probabilities: certain schemata are more likely to fit the data than others.
By pairing concepts like schemata and mental set, we can spell out the ways in which the classical film
solicits the spectator. For instance, one well-known schema of Hollywood film editing is the shot/reverse-
shot pattern. The filmmaker has this ready to hand for representing any two figures, groups, or objects
within the same place. This schema can be fitted to many situations, whatever the differences of figure
placement, camera height, lighting, or focus; whether the image is in widescreen ratio or not; whether the
figures are facing one another or not; etc. Because of the tradition behind the schema, the viewer in turn
expects to see the shot/reverse-shot figure, especially if the first shot of the combination appears. If the next
shot does not obey the schema, the spectator then applies another, less probable, schema to the second shot.
The spectator of the classical film thus riffles through the alternatives normalized by the style, from most to
least likely. Through schemata, the style’s norms not only impose their logic upon the material but also
elicit particular activities from the viewer. The result is that in describing the classical system we are
describing a set of operations that the viewer is expected to perform.
To stress the tasks which the film allots to the spectator allows us to abandon certain illusions of our
own. We no longer need subscribe to copytheories of cinema, whereby a certain style simply replicates the
real world or normal acts of perception; schemata, tied to historically defined purposes, always intervene to
guide us in grasping the film. Nor need we imagine a Svengali cinema holding its audience in thrall. The
classical schemata have created a mental set that still must be activated by and tested against any given
film. Of course, the classical style defines certain spectatorial activities as salient, and the historical
dominance of that style has so accustomed us to those activities that audiences may find other schemata
more burdensome. Yet this dynamic concept of the viewer’s role allows us to explain the very processes that
seem so excessively obvious; as we shall see, even the spectator’s rapt absorption results from a hypothesis-
checking that requires the viewer to meet the film halfway. We can also envision alternative viewing
practices, other activities that the spectator might be asked to perform. The chapters that follow, then,
suggest at several points how the norms of the classical Hollywood style encourage specific activities on the
part of the spectator.

Style in history

If you’re not working for Brezhnev Studio-Mosfilm, you are working for Nixon-Paramount. …
You forget that this same master has been ordering the same film for fifty years.
Wind from the East

To construct the classical Hollywood style as a coherent system, we also need to account for the style’s
historical dimension. In one sense, this entire book tries to do that, by examining the Hollywood mode of
production, the consolidation of the style in a specific period, and the changes that the style undergoes in
subsequent years. At this point, I must indicate that my overall description of the classical style applies to a
set of films across an extensive period. What historical assumptions underlie such a broadly based analysis?
The three levels of generality indicate some of those assumptions. My enterprise assumes a historical
continuity at the two most abstract levels of style (systems and relations among systems); it assumes that the
 AN EXCESSIVELY OBVIOUS CINEMA 9

most distinct changes take place at the level of stylistic devices. For example, through its history Hollywood
cinema seeks to represent events in a temporally continuous fashion; moreover, narrative logic has generally
worked to motivate this temporal continuity. What changes through history are the various devices for
representing temporal continuity such as inter-titles, cuts, irises, dissolves, whip-pans, and wipes.
By stressing the enduring principles of the classical style, we lose some specific detail. In this part, I shall
not reconstruct the choices available to filmmakers at any given moment. If I say that a scene can begin by
drawing back from a significant figure or object, that suggests that an iris, a cut, and a camera movement
are all paradigmatic alternatives. But in 1917, the most probable choice would have been the iris; in 1925,
the cut; in 1935, the camera movement. In discussing the general principles of classical style, I shall often
project the historically variable devices on to the same plane to show their functional equivalence. This
bird’s-eye view enables us to map the basic and persistent features of the style in history. The more minute
history of the devices themselves forms the bulk of Parts Three, Four, and Six.
Historical analysis demands a concept of periodization. Since we are concerned here with a stylistic
history, we cannot presuppose that the periods used to write political or social history will demarcate the
history of an art. That is, there is no immediate compulsion to define a ‘cinema of the 1930s’ as drastically
different from that of ‘the 1940s,’ or to distinguish pre-World War II Hollywood style from postwar
Hollywood style. What, then, will constitute our grounds for periodization? Norms, yes; but also the film
industry, the most proximate and pertinent institution for creating, regulating, and maintaining those norms.
This is not to say that film style and mode of production march across decades in perfect synchronization.
Parts Two and Five will provide a periodization for the Hollywood mode of production that while
congruent in some respects, cannot be simply superimposed upon stylistic history. Nevertheless, we have
chosen to frame our study within the years 1917– 60.
The earlier date is easier to justify. Stylistically, from 1917 on, the classical model became dominant, in
the sense that most American fiction films since that moment employed fundamentally similar narrative,
temporal, and spatial systems. At the same time, the studio mode of production had become organized:
detailed division of labor, the continuity script, and a hierarchical managerial system became the principal
filmmaking procedures. Parts Two and Three detail how style and industry came to be so closely
synchronized by 1917. But why halt an analysis of the classical Hollywood cinema in 1960?
The date triggers suspicion. Stylistically, there is no question that ‘classical’ films are still being made, as
Part Seven will show. Variants of the Hollywood mode of production continue as well. There are thus
compelling reasons to claim that 1960 is a premature cutoff point. On the other hand, some critics may
assert that this ‘classical’ period is far too roomy; one can see any period after 1929 as the ‘breakdown’ of
the Hollywood cinema (the tensions of the Depression, the anguish of war and Cold War, and the
competitive challenge of television).
The year 1960 was chosen for reasons of history and of convenience. In the film industry, it was widely
believed that at the end of the decade Hollywood had reached the end of its mature existence. This Was
Hollywood, the title of a 1960 book by publicist Beth Day, summarizes many reasons for considering the
year as a turning point. Most production firms had converted their energies to television, the dominant
massentertainment form since the mid-1950s; many had reduced their holdings in studio real estate; stars
had become free agents; most producers had become independent; the B-film was virtually dead.17 To
Day’s account we can add other signs of change. By 1960, a certain technological state of the art had been
reached: high-definition color films, wide formats, and high-fidelity magnetic sound had set the standard of
quality that continues today. Moreover, other styles began to challenge the dominance of classicism. The
international art cinema, spearheaded by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, certain Italian directors, and
the French New Wave, offered a more influential and widely disseminated alternative to Hollywood than
10 THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60

had ever existed before. Not that Hollywood was significantly shaken (Part Seven tries to show why), but
the force of the classical norm was reduced somewhat. Despite these reasons, it remains somewhat arbitrary
to see 1960 as closing the classical period. We have chosen it partly because it makes our research
somewhat manageable while still conveying the powerful spread of the classical cinema’s authority.

The ordinary film

Film historians have not generally acknowledged the place of the typical work. In most film histories,
masterworks and innovations rise monumentally out of a hazy terrain whose contours remain unknown. In
other arts, however, the ordinary work is granted considerable importance. Academicism, mainstream
works, the canon, tradition—the history of music, painting, and literature could not do without such
conceptions. ‘I believe,’ remarks Roman Jakobson, ‘that a very important thing in analyzing trends in the
cinema or the structure of a film, is the necessity of considering the base, the background of the spectator’s
habits. What films is the spectator used to seeing? To what forms is he accustomed?’18 My analysis of the
norms of the classical style thus gives privileged place not to the aberrant film that breaks or tests the rules
but to the quietly conformist film that tries simply to follow them.
Between 1915 and 1960, at least fifteen thousand feature films were produced in America. It is
impossible to analyze such a corpus. To construct a model of the ordinary film, we have selected in an
unbiased fashion, 100 films from this period. (Appendix A explains the sampling procedures and lists the
films.) We studied each film on a horizontal viewing machine, recording stylistic details of each shot and
summarizing the film’s action scene by scene. This body of data constitutes our unbiased sample
(abbreviated UnS), and when we cite such a film, an asterisk signals it.
In the stylistic analysis of the cinema, the practice of unbiased sampling is unprecedented, but we believe
it to be a sound way to determine historical norms. When the sample turned up what might be regarded as
auteur films, we accepted this as inevitable in an unbiased sample and treated these films exactly as we did
others. At least four-fifths of the sample, however, constitute a body of fairly obscure productions ranging
across decades, studios, and genres. Furthermore, we have sought to test the conclusions about the UnS films
by closely analyzing almost two hundred other Hollywood films of the 1915–60 period. We chose many of
these films for their quality or historical influence, but many were as undistinguished as our UnS items. We
shall refer to this second set of films as the Extended Sample (ES). My analysis of the classical style takes
the UnS films as the central source of evidence and examples, drawing upon ES films occasionally. This
means that many of the films mentioned will be unfamiliar to readers, but since I argue for their typicality,
the reader will recognize qualities present in many other films.
In one sense, the concept of group style simply makes manifest what we and Hollywood itself ‘already
know.’ Concepts like norm, paradigm, stylistic alternatives, levels of systemic function, periodization, and
schemata are, from this perspective, simply tools in making our habitual intuitions explicit. But these
concepts also enable us to reveal the patterned and stable quality of our assumptions. The concepts can show
that the classical cinema has an underlying logic which is not apparent from our common-sense reflection
upon the films or from Hollywood’s own discourse about them. The theoretical concepts introduced in this
chapter are indispensible to grasping the classical style’s systematic quality. Armed with them, we can go
on to examine how that style characteristically organizes causality, time, and space. The next five chapters,
then, should trigger a certain déja vu; the reader will recognize some familiar filmmaking practices. But
these chapters also seek to explain in a systematic way how these practices work together to create a distinct
film style which, like Poe’s purloined letter, ‘escapes observation by dint of being excessively obvious.’19