Studies in Film Style

18/09/2026

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While viewers will often go and see a film actively seeking a story, few are likely to follow a style. While one might talk in the pub afterwards about a nifty plot twist, far fewer will be remarking on an elaborate tracking shot. This doesn’t mean lengthy single takes haven’t become a thing, and also invoke a tradition. (How many filmmakers from Scorsese to P.T. Anderson have been influenced by Touch of Evil’s opening shot?) But anyone invoking them will be seen less as a common viewer than as a specific cinephile. They are going to the cinema to follow a style. However, most viewers want to be lost in the story, not attentive to the visual acumen. We wouldn’t want to suggest here that one or the other viewer is right, but instead to make several points about style in film. Our first, and perhaps most important, is that in some way all viewers are going to watch a film because of its style. It is why they are watching a film rather than reading a book. They want a story told in images, with a camera replacing the prose, its movement replacing the narrator. Obviously, film doesn’t get rid of the written word altogether, with many a work using voice-over, and even silent films offering intertitles. Nevertheless, the purpose is to narrate the story visually, finding in the camera movements the information the filmmaker wishes the viewer to notice.

There are many ways to do this, and the most obvious is to escape the literary by falling into the theatrical: by using the camera as if it is a human eye watching a (albeit silent) play, and one without colour. Here the camera remains fixed and watches the actors in front of the camera moving through the space. It was the inevitable method first adopted in the 1890s, before films began to pan within the scene, and move towards, and away, from action. That theatrical viewer would no longer be in a fixed chair but, if you like, moving through the auditorium, gaining greater and greater opportunities to look at the image. Over time, film would develop montage, gain sound, find colour and so on, but what interests us are the aspects that we can incorporate into the stylistic chiefly as mise en scene – as elements that are indebted to that initial framing, and how filmmakers have developed, and in some ways retreated, from the evolution of film style.

Citizen Kane is often seen as important because it used its mise en scene (a theatrical term) more ambiguously than many a film before. In the very early years of cinema, the camera couldn’t dictate the action. It could only film it. When looking at films by the Lumiere Brothers or by Robert W. Paul, the viewer can observe a train entering the station with people waiting on the platform, or cyclists in Hyde Park, workers leaving the factory, or a person falling off a boat into the river. Yet the fixed-frame nature of the image means that while the filmmaker can direct our attention to what they are showing us, and show an emphasis in the frame – by putting someone deemed important at the centre of it – they cannot guide our eye beyond this. We notice this problem in the Paul film, where someone falls into the river and the camera, from the river bank, shows people rescuing him. But it is hard to witness the full details of the scene, because the rescuers are in front of the camera and partly blocking our view of events. A moving camera could have curled around the rescuers and shown both the rescue and the man in trouble.

What we see in Paul’s film is technological limitation; what we find in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane is formal innovation. Welles manages to take advantage of developments in film without using them in what had become expected ways. In the scene where young Kane’s mother and father discuss, with the man who will become Kane’s guardian, the boy’s future, so we see Charlie in the background, out the window playing. Welles could easily have crosscut between the two moments, or he could have used a shallower focus that would have left us to concentrate only on the foreground.  All the narrative information is in the scene between Kane’s mother, father and Mr Thatcher, yet Welles shows that film can give us choices while, at the same time, making us well aware of the filmmaker’s control of the image. In scenes in films by the Lumieres and Paul, one can choose because the filmmaker cannot. The viewer scans the frame looking for what matters, and the filmmaker cannot direct us to focus on what might matter to them. Welles has that luxury, but wants to contain it with a modest degree of viewer-freedom, all the while announcing his own virtuoso talent. If Welles insisted that working with all the technology on Citizen Kane was “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had” (BFI), then it was a statement valid in 1941, as it wouldn’t have been forty years earlier. We can see how much more flexible a space mise en scene happens to be when a camera can be as mobile as Welles’s here. In the shot, we initially see Mrs Kane looking out the window as Charlie plays in the snow, and the camera retreats back into the room as Mrs Kane moves towards the camera, followed by Thatcher and Mr Kane. As she sits and Thatcher sits at the desk signing documents, we see in the background Charles still playing in the snow. While in Paul’s film, we can’t even see the person clearly dragged out of the water, in Citizen Kane we get to view foreground and background with equal clarity. The single shot in Paul’s film is a consequence of technological necessity. The shot in Kane, what is available to a filmmaker when the technology is advanced enough to offer so many options within it. If in the earlier years of cinema, numerous theorists and filmmakers reckoned montage was an important development that allowed film to escape the confines of the theatrical, Welles (no stranger to the theatre), suggests that just because film could do editing, that didn’t mean it had to do so. When the technology allows directors to work with complex mise en scene, to take that viewer out of their theatrical seat with a camera that can move around the space freely, then editing can appear like a secondary rather than a primary option. Editing may seem to have freed cinema drama from its narrow theatrical origins. But Welles could see that with the developments of deeper focus, cranes, zoom lenses and dollies, the film could offer mobility without juxtaposition: with cutting from one scene to the other as Welles would have done had he shown Mrs Kane and co, and cut back and forth to Charlie outside in the snow.

Nevertheless, even if Welles illustrates how mobile the frame can be when technology meets innovation, when developments in film coincide with a young director who wants to see what he can do with the evolution, this doesn’t mean that aesthetic originality always coincides with such advances. One of the advantages of film offering more possibilities is that filmmakers can paradoxically insist on greater restrictions. When the camera cannot move freely because of the primitive nature of the form, then the filmmaker is restricted to what they can do. Welles is no longer constrained, and so he activates the freedoms the technology allows. As a rule, American filmmakers have constantly found ways to extend freedoms as soon as the technology becomes available: when the Steadicam was invented in the 1970s, it was promptly used in Bound for Glory, Rocky, Halloween, and then The Shining. It allowed for much smoother movement shots than before, and could give a new dynamism to the image. This didn’t mean American filmmakers couldn’t draw on aspects of cinema’s technological past as well as its future. In the 1970s and early 1980s, The Last Picture Show, Manhattan, and Raging Bull each used black and white when it was all but obsolete. Yet working with fixed ideas over technological progress more often happened outside the US, as international auteurs could define their individuality partly through insisting on recognising an aspect of the form over the inevitability of the medium’s technology. A cynic, or merely a pragmatist, might see this as making do, settling for a modest acceptance of limitations over Hollywood’s can-do know-how. Since so much of the money and many of the resources were in American cinema, Europeans and directors from elsewhere were forced to accept limitations and present them as strengths. There may be some truth to this claim, as many innovations were Hollywood firsts: whether it was the use of Zoom in 1927’s Wings, The Power of Love using 3D in 1922, sound in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, or colour in Becky Sharp in 1935. But this would also be emphasising certain developments over others. The Robe may have been the first Cinemascope film in the early fifties, and was followed by many more as it became a standard format, but in the 1920s, Abel Gance’s Napoleon had experimented with three screens side by side to generate a widescreen format. We should also remember that when people give dates for the birth of cinema, they usually offer 1895-96 – when the French (the Lumiere brothers and George Melies) first presented films to the public. Yet what matters more than who develops a new technology (strictly a science), is how a filmmaker innovates with it. Alfred Hitchcock’s combination of a zoom lens and track to give the impression of Vertigo in his film of that name, or Stanley Kubrick using a camera with the capacity to see more in darker light in Barry Lyndon, which allowed him to shoot scenes only with candles, would be examples of filmmakers thinking not of what the technology can do for you, but what you can do with the technology.

Now when Paul and Lumiere were showing us action, they were constrained by the frame. It was a necessary evil that would become mobile in later years. But a director like Akira Kurosawa could see that just because films could move the camera so easily by the 1960s, that didn’t mean he couldn’t acknowledge the importance of a frame that had never gone away. In High and Low, numerous shots are framed, with Kurosawa seeing what many years earlier would have been constrictions as new formal freedoms. It allows him to carve up the shot into sections, as we find in one scene where the characters are discussing how to retrieve a kidnapped boy. The person who can afford the ransom, Gondo, is on the phone arranging to get the money to give to the kidnapper. Originally, it looked like his son was kidnapped, but the villain took the wrong boy, and now Gondo’s wife insists he must do the right thing and pay the ransom for the boy who has been taken – his chauffeur’s son, who the kidnapper mistook for Gondo’s. The police reckon he should pay up too, but not for the moral reasons proposed by the wife, but because they reckon it means they can keep tabs on the villain and, in time, will be able to get the money back.

We offer these story details so that we can show how Kurosawa visualises the concerns of everyone within the one shot. We see in the foreground on the left-hand side of the frame, the three cops, and in the moderate distance (the room is large), Gondo on the phone, and his wife and the kidnapped boy’s father standing over Gondo as he makes his request. It has an aspect of Welles’ shot in Citizen Kane, but the frame is more pronounced, as Kurosawa insists a limitation becomes a different kind of strength. It would have been easy enough for him to start with the cops and then move in on Gondo, and then pan back a little to incorporate his wife and the boy’s father. This wouldn’t have needed any editing, but it would have taken full advantage of the camera’s mobility. Instead, it is as though Kurosawa believed that to have used that mobility would have obliterated the frame. We would have lost sight of the tension within the fixed shot: one that shows six characters in it, and with different demands and expectations. There are the cops hoping Gondo will follow through so they can get their man, his wife hoping that he will act with honour and prove himself the man she married, and the boy’s father, desperate to have his child back. And there is Gondo, a man of practical action (he has a shoe factory), working on a new project, where he puts up money and hopes for a literal return. It reveals in a single frame what various characters have at stake in this phone call. Film moves at twenty-four frames a second, while a painting or photograph is equivalent to just 1/24th of that second. A painter or photographer has to suggest in the one frame what is instantly meaningful. A filmmaker is under no such obligation, but when cinema leaves a director with so many options, part of their originality lies in leaving many dormant, and instead drawing on another art form altogether.

Let us not pretend that Kurosawa is interested in fixed frame tableaux. All we want to make clear is that he understands the frame as a unit of information that needn’t be cut up into several edited sections, nor even that he needs to move the camera to reveal the different elements in the scene. It is a moment of cinematic economy that shows film can retreat to its ostensibly most primitive state, and prove cinematic in a different way. It might even be the definition of style in film: how does a filmmaker move beyond the technique of their art form as it hurtles forward, absorbing sound, colour, different film stock, 3D, lens developments, camera options, digital and so on? As a technology, film risks a constant escape from obsolescence, but the flipside of this that it becomes too enamoured by the new. When a filmmaking guide insisted that filmmakers needed to push perspective, the purpose was to keep up with the competition and to make sure your film was seen using the latest technology, lest it looked outdated. As Mike Figgis sardonically proposed: “If somebody goes for a piss these days, it’s usually a crane shot.” (Projections 10) But this often isn’t practising a style. It is abdicating aesthetic responsibility. Refusing that abdication could lead filmmakers elsewhere, seeing cinema not only as a technology in which they needed to play constant catch-up, but a historical form that offers a director many options. Just because films become faster, with more camera movements and a greater number of edits, that doesn’t mean they need be obligatory. A filmmaker can look at Kurosawa’s scene and see how he resists some of the demands, and how they, in turn, could resist them also. It would be easy to see a filmmaker pushing in on Gondo as he is on the phone, and cutting back and forth between the various faces looking on, and Gondo on the phone, but Kurosawa can teach directors how to see the frame as a frame.

The film was indeed remade by a filmmaker not known for his restraint: Spike Lee made Highest and Lowest in 2025. It wasn’t an insult to the original, but one would be unlikely to go to Lee’s remake for fresh ideas on how to generate tension in a mise en scene, based on specific framing of the action. Lee’s work remains within the evolution of film, while Kurosawa’s could be seen as devolution, yet not in the sense of a degenerate state, but renewing possibilities within a twofold history: that of the medium of film, and also of the other arts. It is devolutionary in the sense that a government devolves: allowing other areas to develop beyond the main body of power. Hollywood may well be the evolutionary force in film technologically, but Europe and elsewhere have a devolutionary awareness of how cinema has progressed alongside other art forms. Kurosawa knows that just because film was limited by the fixed frame in its early years, that needn’t mean it had to escape from such constraints as the technology developed. Instead, technological development allows the fixed shot to become a source of creative decision-making. Equally, the fixed frame is a given of painting, and artists must wonder how they can convey complexity of information, knowing that they can’t expand their canvas left to right or vice versa, or cut to the next piece of action. Film is under no such obligation, but it can give to a filmmaker a grasp not just of the mise en scene, but the frame too when they do decide to think like a painter.

Just as Kurosawa, in his black and white High and Low, often thinks of the frame as if a painter with a frame, so Agnes Varda in Le Bonheur thinks of painterly colour. A painting without colour is usually a drawing, even if there are instances of ‘black and white’ paintings like Van Gogh’s Cart with Black Ox, Picasso’s Guernica and Rothko’s Untitled Black on Gray. But most images in art without colour are sketches, and most of the most famous instances are in black and white or sepia: Vitruvian Man, Study for St Paul Preaching in Athens, Drawing of a Horse. For much of its history before the 1960s, most films were in black and white, and they were never regarded as sketches or preliminary works, no matter the brief desire for colourisation in the 1980s, which would turn films like It’s a Wonderful Life into the colour extravaganza that technology, budget, etc. limited it from being. It was luckily a short-lived preoccupation and opposed by many filmmakers, including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, John Huston and George Lucas. Writing on colourisation, Michael Dempsey noted, “color may have been too costly for most American studio movies during the 1930s and 1940s, but once black-and-white photography was chosen, the movies were designed, costumed and lit accordingly.” (Film Quarterly) Only someone who couldn’t see beyond technology as teleology (as inevitable progress) would see colourisation as a good idea. Everyone else recognised that numerous aesthetic decisions were made at a given moment in time, based on the available materials, and this needed to be respected.

Scorsese and co. knew their film history, and while they might be American filmmakers working in a system that pursues the technological, they were also individuals who found ways, on occasion, to resist the forward momentum. Scorsese may be partly responsible for the pace of modern films, with Goodfellas using numerous camera movements and cutting to intensify the action and the storytelling. As Scorsese says, quoted in David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It, “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [Goodfellas] is sort of my version of MTV.” But as we have noted, he also filmed Raging Bull, mainly in black and white. Woody Allen frequently chose monochrome, including in Manhattan, Stardust Memories and Broadway Danny Rose.

They could see that there was a choice, and while this could seem bloody-minded in the 1980s, when few others were using monochrome, it allowed Scorsese and Allen to announce the importance of choice. In the mid-1960s, choosing monochrome or colour in European cinema became a question as readily as a choice. Many films were still in black and white (including most in the Czech and Polish New Waves), and most of the French New Wave filmmakers had only just moved into colour: Godard with Le Mepris, Pierrot le fou, and others; Resnais with Muriel, Demy with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Rivette and Truffaut were about to do so with The Nun and Fahrenheit 451. Varda said that “I’m more likely to make choices based on feeling rather than reflection since I have a very strong sense of colour.” (Varda on Varda) In such a claim, she wasn’t wary of the shift, but looking forward to it, and there is in Le Bonheur an exuberance to its use, a little like with Godard’s Pierrot le fou, and her own husband’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Godard, Demy and Varda in different ways give their images an artificial quality, asking the viewer to accept the style, while risking the viewer’s disengagement. The colours can seem so rich and derealizing that they possess an aspect of animation or pop art. This isn’t a move towards colour that announces simply an engagement with a real world that monochrome couldn’t quite achieve, but one that wants to capture the milieu without quite insisting we believe in it. In a scene where central character, husband and father of two, Francois, asks another woman out, they go for a coffee near Chateau de Vincennes. The cafe colours and the clothes people are wearing seem both natural and exaggerated, bringing out a warm, summer aspect alongside a feeling that the characters are dressed for the mise en scene.  When they get up after their coffees, so much in the shot is orange and puff blue, and yet we don’t feel the colours are comedically constraining – as we find in some of Wes Anderson’s work, with the father and the boys in the matching red Adidas tracksuits in The Royal Tenenbaums, for example. After, when they walk through the park, the colours are naturalistic as the camera moves in front of them. Just afterwards, in the next scene, we have a medium long shot of a building and cars mainly in yellow and blue. Just after that, a series of shots plays up blues as Francois paints a blue piece of wood that will be part of a toy petrol station he is making for the kids. Almost everything in the scene offers shades of blue, but this isn’t a sign of sadness. Nothing suggests Francois is sad, and this is partly the point of the film. Francois will embark on the affair guiltlessly, and Le Bonheur asks us to accept a psychology that seems contrary to most lived experience. Varda doesn’t want the blue to be a symbol of anything. While blue is of course often linked to melancholy, and a ‘blue’ feeling, Varda insists, “there’s nothing symbolic there.” (Agnes Varda Interviews) Since there is nothing unhappy about Francois, to insist that this represents sadness would be denying the filmmaker’s claims and what the film is showing us onscreen.

So what does Varda’s use of colour mean? Maybe mean is too strong a verb, and instead we shouldn’t look for interpretive assertiveness, but affective complexity. The colours help give to a story that seems psychologically unreal, even as the spaces and places of mid-sixties Paris feel very real indeed, a correlative to that characterisational implausibility, by offering colours so rich it suggests a visual utopia. The colours match the absurd and, many will insist, the selfish optimism Francois insists upon. Francois wants his cake and to eat it – and so Varda offers it up as the most colourful of gateaux. Even as the film turns very dark, Varda reckons this need not necessarily be so from Francois’s perspective, as he will continue to enjoy the good life, just in a slightly different formulation. Without giving too much away, Varda doesn’t simply insist Francois is a terrible and shallow character, but perhaps more that guilt, despair and grief aren’t always very useful. Francois seeks happiness no matter the circumstances, and Varda says, “The subject of the film is really that a guy who is constitutionally drawn to happiness both because of his love of nature and his other aptitudes, and for lack of any outside pressures (whether religious, political, etc.) well, for a character like that, you notice that any person focused on happiness supposes and requires that he will have to invent some ethical position.” (Agnes Varda Interviews) However, rather than laying out a new ethics, Varda proposes a new aesthetics, containing the story within a visual richness that leaves us viewing the film as both a pressing question and a visual derealisation. We cannot quite believe the story, and become immersed in the colours, and an odd type of conjunction between the suspension of disbelief in the tale and a belief in the beauty of the film’s style leaves the viewer with a contrary and complex feeling, one that might not have been evident if Varda had filmed it in black and white.

In a way, Varda’s film could have been called Playtime, but it would be the title of a Jacques Tati film made a couple of years after Varda’s. If we have noted that Citizen Kane’s relationship to style is through a deeper focus and a longer take, High and Low’s in emphasising the framing, and Varda’s through the use of colour, Tati’s film is a masterful examination of mise en scene as comedically democratic. There may be disputes over how free the director’s mise en scene happens to be, with Lucy Fischer seeing a marvellously benevolent despot at work. She reckons that, rather than Tati offering a work consistent with Andre Bazin's belief in a long-take mise en scene, which gives the viewer far greater freedom than we usually expect, Tati often directs our attention. Tati might insist that “I love the long-shot. It is up to the spectator to discover what he wants to see” (Sight and Sound), but Fischer is having none of it, or only a little of it. Through sound and specific images, Fischer notes that Tati often dictates our eye and ear, as when she says, “We hear (against an acoustic background of music, singing, talking, etc.) a loud fizzing sound indicating that the tablet is some variety of antacid. The man puts the drink down, and [central character] Hulot walks into the frame. He sips it, grimaces and emits a loud gulping sound. It is no wonder that in the visual chaos we have ‘chosen' to notice this small gag.” (Sight and Sound) The image might have lots going on, but the sound narrows down our attention. Fischer also notes that one reason we constantly spot a man in the frame that Hulot seeks is that he always carries a bright blue folder and a more muted blue jacket.

Though the image might have many things at work, this doesn’t mean the viewer isn’t cued to observe some things over others. Jonathan Rosenbaum responded to Fischer’s claims by saying that while he agreed that Tati asks us to notice certain things, “just as clearly, they are designed to divert the spectator from other things, some of which later develop into events or gags which take one entirely by surprise.” (JonathanRosenbaum) What seems generally true is that the film directs the humour, but doesn’t quite dictate the mise en scene. This isn’t the same thing as saying anything beyond the gag is chaotic; only to insist that Tati wants humour contained within a broader realism, the sort of realism Bazin thought was vital to cinema’s capacity to reveal life. As Bazin believed: “if the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of concrete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by way of which is real, it becomes all the more important to discern these elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality and those which destroy that feeling.” (‘Theatre and Cinema’) Bazinian realism needn’t, of course, mean that the image becomes random; it can just absorb more information that gives a greater impression of life than before, and can help direct our attention to moments of pertinence, without too categorically doing so.

  In one scene, in the restaurant, we see two waiters serving a couple of customers and, in their duplicated gestures, reveal the inefficiency of their professionalism. As one moves with rigid predictability, so the other moves likewise, and he ends up duplicating the gesture as they both move in unison. Both try and put a plate down in the same place, and then, too, the cutlery as the customers politely watch. All the while the film allows us to see events in the background as vividly as Welles did in Citizen Kane, as people dine at others’ tables, or dance in the space available. As one of the waiters leaves with his tray, the other one is about to serve up the fish when he is called, leaves the frame, and the foreground becomes less important than the background as a group of a dozen American women appear. One of them arrives a moment later, and the film cuts to a medium shot of her as she looks a little lost and might be feeling a bit insecure. Especially when diners comment to each other about her shoes, and this woman in a green dress pulls her overcoat together as if to hide herself. While we might find the behaviour of the waiters funny, we are unlikely to find amusing the diners’ comments about the woman’s attire. But Tati would probably say that if we are looking for humour, our purpose should be to find it in the myriad observations he offers, some of which will be worth a laugh, others worth a thought, and all worth a look. “I let the people more observe with me. It’s a little invitation to say […] we’re going to watch the people.” (Studs Terkel) What we can claim is that Tati is returning to some of the constraints of early cinema, but for very different reasons. When we look at the Lumieres’ Workers Leaving the Factory, we observe numerous bodies and faces piling out of the Lyon building. But this isn’t the Lumiere brothers choosing an aesthetic style; they are simply using a new medium to record what is in front of this marvellous movie camera. Tati says, seventy years later, we shouldn’t ignore that early joy of witnessing reality as it had never quite been seen before, but now he also has access to colour, sound, and camera movement, and can deploy them all to guide our eye without quite insisting on what we should see.  It suggests that after 70 years of film, cinema could be both as despotic as Fischer proposes, but also benignly willing to allow the viewer’s eye and ear to pick up details that in other films wouldn’t be there to observe. They would be hidden by shallow focus, or an abrupt reaction shot, by non-diegetic music, or by a categorical insert. Instead, we see once again the flow of life proposed by the Lumieres, but with a series of decisions that indicates this isn’t the birth of cinema. It is the opportunity for a different type of comedy. It becomes style; one that can best be seen as a choice taken rather than an expectation met.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Style

While viewers will often go and see a film actively seeking a story, few are likely to follow a style. While one might talk in the pub afterwards about a nifty plot twist, far fewer will be remarking on an elaborate tracking shot. This doesn’t mean lengthy single takes haven’t become a thing, and also invoke a tradition. (How many filmmakers from Scorsese to P.T. Anderson have been influenced by Touch of Evil’s opening shot?) But anyone invoking them will be seen less as a common viewer than as a specific cinephile. They are going to the cinema to follow a style. However, most viewers want to be lost in the story, not attentive to the visual acumen. We wouldn’t want to suggest here that one or the other viewer is right, but instead to make several points about style in film. Our first, and perhaps most important, is that in some way all viewers are going to watch a film because of its style. It is why they are watching a film rather than reading a book. They want a story told in images, with a camera replacing the prose, its movement replacing the narrator. Obviously, film doesn’t get rid of the written word altogether, with many a work using voice-over, and even silent films offering intertitles. Nevertheless, the purpose is to narrate the story visually, finding in the camera movements the information the filmmaker wishes the viewer to notice.

There are many ways to do this, and the most obvious is to escape the literary by falling into the theatrical: by using the camera as if it is a human eye watching a (albeit silent) play, and one without colour. Here the camera remains fixed and watches the actors in front of the camera moving through the space. It was the inevitable method first adopted in the 1890s, before films began to pan within the scene, and move towards, and away, from action. That theatrical viewer would no longer be in a fixed chair but, if you like, moving through the auditorium, gaining greater and greater opportunities to look at the image. Over time, film would develop montage, gain sound, find colour and so on, but what interests us are the aspects that we can incorporate into the stylistic chiefly as mise en scene – as elements that are indebted to that initial framing, and how filmmakers have developed, and in some ways retreated, from the evolution of film style.

Citizen Kane is often seen as important because it used its mise en scene (a theatrical term) more ambiguously than many a film before. In the very early years of cinema, the camera couldn’t dictate the action. It could only film it. When looking at films by the Lumiere Brothers or by Robert W. Paul, the viewer can observe a train entering the station with people waiting on the platform, or cyclists in Hyde Park, workers leaving the factory, or a person falling off a boat into the river. Yet the fixed-frame nature of the image means that while the filmmaker can direct our attention to what they are showing us, and show an emphasis in the frame – by putting someone deemed important at the centre of it – they cannot guide our eye beyond this. We notice this problem in the Paul film, where someone falls into the river and the camera, from the river bank, shows people rescuing him. But it is hard to witness the full details of the scene, because the rescuers are in front of the camera and partly blocking our view of events. A moving camera could have curled around the rescuers and shown both the rescue and the man in trouble.

What we see in Paul’s film is technological limitation; what we find in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane is formal innovation. Welles manages to take advantage of developments in film without using them in what had become expected ways. In the scene where young Kane’s mother and father discuss, with the man who will become Kane’s guardian, the boy’s future, so we see Charlie in the background, out the window playing. Welles could easily have crosscut between the two moments, or he could have used a shallower focus that would have left us to concentrate only on the foreground.  All the narrative information is in the scene between Kane’s mother, father and Mr Thatcher, yet Welles shows that film can give us choices while, at the same time, making us well aware of the filmmaker’s control of the image. In scenes in films by the Lumieres and Paul, one can choose because the filmmaker cannot. The viewer scans the frame looking for what matters, and the filmmaker cannot direct us to focus on what might matter to them. Welles has that luxury, but wants to contain it with a modest degree of viewer-freedom, all the while announcing his own virtuoso talent. If Welles insisted that working with all the technology on Citizen Kane was “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had” (BFI), then it was a statement valid in 1941, as it wouldn’t have been forty years earlier. We can see how much more flexible a space mise en scene happens to be when a camera can be as mobile as Welles’s here. In the shot, we initially see Mrs Kane looking out the window as Charlie plays in the snow, and the camera retreats back into the room as Mrs Kane moves towards the camera, followed by Thatcher and Mr Kane. As she sits and Thatcher sits at the desk signing documents, we see in the background Charles still playing in the snow. While in Paul’s film, we can’t even see the person clearly dragged out of the water, in Citizen Kane we get to view foreground and background with equal clarity. The single shot in Paul’s film is a consequence of technological necessity. The shot in Kane, what is available to a filmmaker when the technology is advanced enough to offer so many options within it. If in the earlier years of cinema, numerous theorists and filmmakers reckoned montage was an important development that allowed film to escape the confines of the theatrical, Welles (no stranger to the theatre), suggests that just because film could do editing, that didn’t mean it had to do so. When the technology allows directors to work with complex mise en scene, to take that viewer out of their theatrical seat with a camera that can move around the space freely, then editing can appear like a secondary rather than a primary option. Editing may seem to have freed cinema drama from its narrow theatrical origins. But Welles could see that with the developments of deeper focus, cranes, zoom lenses and dollies, the film could offer mobility without juxtaposition: with cutting from one scene to the other as Welles would have done had he shown Mrs Kane and co, and cut back and forth to Charlie outside in the snow.

Nevertheless, even if Welles illustrates how mobile the frame can be when technology meets innovation, when developments in film coincide with a young director who wants to see what he can do with the evolution, this doesn’t mean that aesthetic originality always coincides with such advances. One of the advantages of film offering more possibilities is that filmmakers can paradoxically insist on greater restrictions. When the camera cannot move freely because of the primitive nature of the form, then the filmmaker is restricted to what they can do. Welles is no longer constrained, and so he activates the freedoms the technology allows. As a rule, American filmmakers have constantly found ways to extend freedoms as soon as the technology becomes available: when the Steadicam was invented in the 1970s, it was promptly used in Bound for Glory, Rocky, Halloween, and then The Shining. It allowed for much smoother movement shots than before, and could give a new dynamism to the image. This didn’t mean American filmmakers couldn’t draw on aspects of cinema’s technological past as well as its future. In the 1970s and early 1980s, The Last Picture Show, Manhattan, and Raging Bull each used black and white when it was all but obsolete. Yet working with fixed ideas over technological progress more often happened outside the US, as international auteurs could define their individuality partly through insisting on recognising an aspect of the form over the inevitability of the medium’s technology. A cynic, or merely a pragmatist, might see this as making do, settling for a modest acceptance of limitations over Hollywood’s can-do know-how. Since so much of the money and many of the resources were in American cinema, Europeans and directors from elsewhere were forced to accept limitations and present them as strengths. There may be some truth to this claim, as many innovations were Hollywood firsts: whether it was the use of Zoom in 1927’s Wings, The Power of Love using 3D in 1922, sound in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, or colour in Becky Sharp in 1935. But this would also be emphasising certain developments over others. The Robe may have been the first Cinemascope film in the early fifties, and was followed by many more as it became a standard format, but in the 1920s, Abel Gance’s Napoleon had experimented with three screens side by side to generate a widescreen format. We should also remember that when people give dates for the birth of cinema, they usually offer 1895-96 – when the French (the Lumiere brothers and George Melies) first presented films to the public. Yet what matters more than who develops a new technology (strictly a science), is how a filmmaker innovates with it. Alfred Hitchcock’s combination of a zoom lens and track to give the impression of Vertigo in his film of that name, or Stanley Kubrick using a camera with the capacity to see more in darker light in Barry Lyndon, which allowed him to shoot scenes only with candles, would be examples of filmmakers thinking not of what the technology can do for you, but what you can do with the technology.

Now when Paul and Lumiere were showing us action, they were constrained by the frame. It was a necessary evil that would become mobile in later years. But a director like Akira Kurosawa could see that just because films could move the camera so easily by the 1960s, that didn’t mean he couldn’t acknowledge the importance of a frame that had never gone away. In High and Low, numerous shots are framed, with Kurosawa seeing what many years earlier would have been constrictions as new formal freedoms. It allows him to carve up the shot into sections, as we find in one scene where the characters are discussing how to retrieve a kidnapped boy. The person who can afford the ransom, Gondo, is on the phone arranging to get the money to give to the kidnapper. Originally, it looked like his son was kidnapped, but the villain took the wrong boy, and now Gondo’s wife insists he must do the right thing and pay the ransom for the boy who has been taken – his chauffeur’s son, who the kidnapper mistook for Gondo’s. The police reckon he should pay up too, but not for the moral reasons proposed by the wife, but because they reckon it means they can keep tabs on the villain and, in time, will be able to get the money back.

We offer these story details so that we can show how Kurosawa visualises the concerns of everyone within the one shot. We see in the foreground on the left-hand side of the frame, the three cops, and in the moderate distance (the room is large), Gondo on the phone, and his wife and the kidnapped boy’s father standing over Gondo as he makes his request. It has an aspect of Welles’ shot in Citizen Kane, but the frame is more pronounced, as Kurosawa insists a limitation becomes a different kind of strength. It would have been easy enough for him to start with the cops and then move in on Gondo, and then pan back a little to incorporate his wife and the boy’s father. This wouldn’t have needed any editing, but it would have taken full advantage of the camera’s mobility. Instead, it is as though Kurosawa believed that to have used that mobility would have obliterated the frame. We would have lost sight of the tension within the fixed shot: one that shows six characters in it, and with different demands and expectations. There are the cops hoping Gondo will follow through so they can get their man, his wife hoping that he will act with honour and prove himself the man she married, and the boy’s father, desperate to have his child back. And there is Gondo, a man of practical action (he has a shoe factory), working on a new project, where he puts up money and hopes for a literal return. It reveals in a single frame what various characters have at stake in this phone call. Film moves at twenty-four frames a second, while a painting or photograph is equivalent to just 1/24th of that second. A painter or photographer has to suggest in the one frame what is instantly meaningful. A filmmaker is under no such obligation, but when cinema leaves a director with so many options, part of their originality lies in leaving many dormant, and instead drawing on another art form altogether.

Let us not pretend that Kurosawa is interested in fixed frame tableaux. All we want to make clear is that he understands the frame as a unit of information that needn’t be cut up into several edited sections, nor even that he needs to move the camera to reveal the different elements in the scene. It is a moment of cinematic economy that shows film can retreat to its ostensibly most primitive state, and prove cinematic in a different way. It might even be the definition of style in film: how does a filmmaker move beyond the technique of their art form as it hurtles forward, absorbing sound, colour, different film stock, 3D, lens developments, camera options, digital and so on? As a technology, film risks a constant escape from obsolescence, but the flipside of this that it becomes too enamoured by the new. When a filmmaking guide insisted that filmmakers needed to push perspective, the purpose was to keep up with the competition and to make sure your film was seen using the latest technology, lest it looked outdated. As Mike Figgis sardonically proposed: “If somebody goes for a piss these days, it’s usually a crane shot.” (Projections 10) But this often isn’t practising a style. It is abdicating aesthetic responsibility. Refusing that abdication could lead filmmakers elsewhere, seeing cinema not only as a technology in which they needed to play constant catch-up, but a historical form that offers a director many options. Just because films become faster, with more camera movements and a greater number of edits, that doesn’t mean they need be obligatory. A filmmaker can look at Kurosawa’s scene and see how he resists some of the demands, and how they, in turn, could resist them also. It would be easy to see a filmmaker pushing in on Gondo as he is on the phone, and cutting back and forth between the various faces looking on, and Gondo on the phone, but Kurosawa can teach directors how to see the frame as a frame.

The film was indeed remade by a filmmaker not known for his restraint: Spike Lee made Highest and Lowest in 2025. It wasn’t an insult to the original, but one would be unlikely to go to Lee’s remake for fresh ideas on how to generate tension in a mise en scene, based on specific framing of the action. Lee’s work remains within the evolution of film, while Kurosawa’s could be seen as devolution, yet not in the sense of a degenerate state, but renewing possibilities within a twofold history: that of the medium of film, and also of the other arts. It is devolutionary in the sense that a government devolves: allowing other areas to develop beyond the main body of power. Hollywood may well be the evolutionary force in film technologically, but Europe and elsewhere have a devolutionary awareness of how cinema has progressed alongside other art forms. Kurosawa knows that just because film was limited by the fixed frame in its early years, that needn’t mean it had to escape from such constraints as the technology developed. Instead, technological development allows the fixed shot to become a source of creative decision-making. Equally, the fixed frame is a given of painting, and artists must wonder how they can convey complexity of information, knowing that they can’t expand their canvas left to right or vice versa, or cut to the next piece of action. Film is under no such obligation, but it can give to a filmmaker a grasp not just of the mise en scene, but the frame too when they do decide to think like a painter.

Just as Kurosawa, in his black and white High and Low, often thinks of the frame as if a painter with a frame, so Agnes Varda in Le Bonheur thinks of painterly colour. A painting without colour is usually a drawing, even if there are instances of ‘black and white’ paintings like Van Gogh’s Cart with Black Ox, Picasso’s Guernica and Rothko’s Untitled Black on Gray. But most images in art without colour are sketches, and most of the most famous instances are in black and white or sepia: Vitruvian Man, Study for St Paul Preaching in Athens, Drawing of a Horse. For much of its history before the 1960s, most films were in black and white, and they were never regarded as sketches or preliminary works, no matter the brief desire for colourisation in the 1980s, which would turn films like It’s a Wonderful Life into the colour extravaganza that technology, budget, etc. limited it from being. It was luckily a short-lived preoccupation and opposed by many filmmakers, including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, John Huston and George Lucas. Writing on colourisation, Michael Dempsey noted, “color may have been too costly for most American studio movies during the 1930s and 1940s, but once black-and-white photography was chosen, the movies were designed, costumed and lit accordingly.” (Film Quarterly) Only someone who couldn’t see beyond technology as teleology (as inevitable progress) would see colourisation as a good idea. Everyone else recognised that numerous aesthetic decisions were made at a given moment in time, based on the available materials, and this needed to be respected.

Scorsese and co. knew their film history, and while they might be American filmmakers working in a system that pursues the technological, they were also individuals who found ways, on occasion, to resist the forward momentum. Scorsese may be partly responsible for the pace of modern films, with Goodfellas using numerous camera movements and cutting to intensify the action and the storytelling. As Scorsese says, quoted in David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It, “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [Goodfellas] is sort of my version of MTV.” But as we have noted, he also filmed Raging Bull, mainly in black and white. Woody Allen frequently chose monochrome, including in Manhattan, Stardust Memories and Broadway Danny Rose.

They could see that there was a choice, and while this could seem bloody-minded in the 1980s, when few others were using monochrome, it allowed Scorsese and Allen to announce the importance of choice. In the mid-1960s, choosing monochrome or colour in European cinema became a question as readily as a choice. Many films were still in black and white (including most in the Czech and Polish New Waves), and most of the French New Wave filmmakers had only just moved into colour: Godard with Le Mepris, Pierrot le fou, and others; Resnais with Muriel, Demy with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Rivette and Truffaut were about to do so with The Nun and Fahrenheit 451. Varda said that “I’m more likely to make choices based on feeling rather than reflection since I have a very strong sense of colour.” (Varda on Varda) In such a claim, she wasn’t wary of the shift, but looking forward to it, and there is in Le Bonheur an exuberance to its use, a little like with Godard’s Pierrot le fou, and her own husband’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Godard, Demy and Varda in different ways give their images an artificial quality, asking the viewer to accept the style, while risking the viewer’s disengagement. The colours can seem so rich and derealizing that they possess an aspect of animation or pop art. This isn’t a move towards colour that announces simply an engagement with a real world that monochrome couldn’t quite achieve, but one that wants to capture the milieu without quite insisting we believe in it. In a scene where central character, husband and father of two, Francois, asks another woman out, they go for a coffee near Chateau de Vincennes. The cafe colours and the clothes people are wearing seem both natural and exaggerated, bringing out a warm, summer aspect alongside a feeling that the characters are dressed for the mise en scene.  When they get up after their coffees, so much in the shot is orange and puff blue, and yet we don’t feel the colours are comedically constraining – as we find in some of Wes Anderson’s work, with the father and the boys in the matching red Adidas tracksuits in The Royal Tenenbaums, for example. After, when they walk through the park, the colours are naturalistic as the camera moves in front of them. Just afterwards, in the next scene, we have a medium long shot of a building and cars mainly in yellow and blue. Just after that, a series of shots plays up blues as Francois paints a blue piece of wood that will be part of a toy petrol station he is making for the kids. Almost everything in the scene offers shades of blue, but this isn’t a sign of sadness. Nothing suggests Francois is sad, and this is partly the point of the film. Francois will embark on the affair guiltlessly, and Le Bonheur asks us to accept a psychology that seems contrary to most lived experience. Varda doesn’t want the blue to be a symbol of anything. While blue is of course often linked to melancholy, and a ‘blue’ feeling, Varda insists, “there’s nothing symbolic there.” (Agnes Varda Interviews) Since there is nothing unhappy about Francois, to insist that this represents sadness would be denying the filmmaker’s claims and what the film is showing us onscreen.

So what does Varda’s use of colour mean? Maybe mean is too strong a verb, and instead we shouldn’t look for interpretive assertiveness, but affective complexity. The colours help give to a story that seems psychologically unreal, even as the spaces and places of mid-sixties Paris feel very real indeed, a correlative to that characterisational implausibility, by offering colours so rich it suggests a visual utopia. The colours match the absurd and, many will insist, the selfish optimism Francois insists upon. Francois wants his cake and to eat it – and so Varda offers it up as the most colourful of gateaux. Even as the film turns very dark, Varda reckons this need not necessarily be so from Francois’s perspective, as he will continue to enjoy the good life, just in a slightly different formulation. Without giving too much away, Varda doesn’t simply insist Francois is a terrible and shallow character, but perhaps more that guilt, despair and grief aren’t always very useful. Francois seeks happiness no matter the circumstances, and Varda says, “The subject of the film is really that a guy who is constitutionally drawn to happiness both because of his love of nature and his other aptitudes, and for lack of any outside pressures (whether religious, political, etc.) well, for a character like that, you notice that any person focused on happiness supposes and requires that he will have to invent some ethical position.” (Agnes Varda Interviews) However, rather than laying out a new ethics, Varda proposes a new aesthetics, containing the story within a visual richness that leaves us viewing the film as both a pressing question and a visual derealisation. We cannot quite believe the story, and become immersed in the colours, and an odd type of conjunction between the suspension of disbelief in the tale and a belief in the beauty of the film’s style leaves the viewer with a contrary and complex feeling, one that might not have been evident if Varda had filmed it in black and white.

In a way, Varda’s film could have been called Playtime, but it would be the title of a Jacques Tati film made a couple of years after Varda’s. If we have noted that Citizen Kane’s relationship to style is through a deeper focus and a longer take, High and Low’s in emphasising the framing, and Varda’s through the use of colour, Tati’s film is a masterful examination of mise en scene as comedically democratic. There may be disputes over how free the director’s mise en scene happens to be, with Lucy Fischer seeing a marvellously benevolent despot at work. She reckons that, rather than Tati offering a work consistent with Andre Bazin's belief in a long-take mise en scene, which gives the viewer far greater freedom than we usually expect, Tati often directs our attention. Tati might insist that “I love the long-shot. It is up to the spectator to discover what he wants to see” (Sight and Sound), but Fischer is having none of it, or only a little of it. Through sound and specific images, Fischer notes that Tati often dictates our eye and ear, as when she says, “We hear (against an acoustic background of music, singing, talking, etc.) a loud fizzing sound indicating that the tablet is some variety of antacid. The man puts the drink down, and [central character] Hulot walks into the frame. He sips it, grimaces and emits a loud gulping sound. It is no wonder that in the visual chaos we have ‘chosen' to notice this small gag.” (Sight and Sound) The image might have lots going on, but the sound narrows down our attention. Fischer also notes that one reason we constantly spot a man in the frame that Hulot seeks is that he always carries a bright blue folder and a more muted blue jacket.

Though the image might have many things at work, this doesn’t mean the viewer isn’t cued to observe some things over others. Jonathan Rosenbaum responded to Fischer’s claims by saying that while he agreed that Tati asks us to notice certain things, “just as clearly, they are designed to divert the spectator from other things, some of which later develop into events or gags which take one entirely by surprise.” (JonathanRosenbaum) What seems generally true is that the film directs the humour, but doesn’t quite dictate the mise en scene. This isn’t the same thing as saying anything beyond the gag is chaotic; only to insist that Tati wants humour contained within a broader realism, the sort of realism Bazin thought was vital to cinema’s capacity to reveal life. As Bazin believed: “if the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of concrete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by way of which is real, it becomes all the more important to discern these elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality and those which destroy that feeling.” (‘Theatre and Cinema’) Bazinian realism needn’t, of course, mean that the image becomes random; it can just absorb more information that gives a greater impression of life than before, and can help direct our attention to moments of pertinence, without too categorically doing so.

  In one scene, in the restaurant, we see two waiters serving a couple of customers and, in their duplicated gestures, reveal the inefficiency of their professionalism. As one moves with rigid predictability, so the other moves likewise, and he ends up duplicating the gesture as they both move in unison. Both try and put a plate down in the same place, and then, too, the cutlery as the customers politely watch. All the while the film allows us to see events in the background as vividly as Welles did in Citizen Kane, as people dine at others’ tables, or dance in the space available. As one of the waiters leaves with his tray, the other one is about to serve up the fish when he is called, leaves the frame, and the foreground becomes less important than the background as a group of a dozen American women appear. One of them arrives a moment later, and the film cuts to a medium shot of her as she looks a little lost and might be feeling a bit insecure. Especially when diners comment to each other about her shoes, and this woman in a green dress pulls her overcoat together as if to hide herself. While we might find the behaviour of the waiters funny, we are unlikely to find amusing the diners’ comments about the woman’s attire. But Tati would probably say that if we are looking for humour, our purpose should be to find it in the myriad observations he offers, some of which will be worth a laugh, others worth a thought, and all worth a look. “I let the people more observe with me. It’s a little invitation to say […] we’re going to watch the people.” (Studs Terkel) What we can claim is that Tati is returning to some of the constraints of early cinema, but for very different reasons. When we look at the Lumieres’ Workers Leaving the Factory, we observe numerous bodies and faces piling out of the Lyon building. But this isn’t the Lumiere brothers choosing an aesthetic style; they are simply using a new medium to record what is in front of this marvellous movie camera. Tati says, seventy years later, we shouldn’t ignore that early joy of witnessing reality as it had never quite been seen before, but now he also has access to colour, sound, and camera movement, and can deploy them all to guide our eye without quite insisting on what we should see.  It suggests that after 70 years of film, cinema could be both as despotic as Fischer proposes, but also benignly willing to allow the viewer’s eye and ear to pick up details that in other films wouldn’t be there to observe. They would be hidden by shallow focus, or an abrupt reaction shot, by non-diegetic music, or by a categorical insert. Instead, we see once again the flow of life proposed by the Lumieres, but with a series of decisions that indicates this isn’t the birth of cinema. It is the opportunity for a different type of comedy. It becomes style; one that can best be seen as a choice taken rather than an expectation met.


© Tony McKibbin