This is a broad area that involves the many techniques that directors use to get across the creative message on the screen. While all films use moving images to narrate a story, not all cinematographic styles are alike. The cinema history during the past century has witnessed different schools and styles of filmmaking and with those different paradigms of filmmaking came different rules and principles of cinematography, montage, sound design and so on. The knowledge of the distinctions of the principal styles of films offers the appreciation of this versatile medium.
Classical Hollywood Style
The style of filmmaking that Hollywood exemplified prior to the 1960s is one of the most important eras in the history of film. Pioneered in the early part of the twentieth century as the film studios started to develop in Hollywood, it remained for long the dominant mode of production in mainstream American filmmaking. In films that employ Classical Hollywood style, there is focus on the story, the continuity of the space and time and little motion, and clean transitions. They also employ some formulaic conventions, most notably, the standard three-act storyline. Technique is employed in this respect to make the apparatus of filmmaking recede into the background, or at least not to be a primary focus in the process of drawing the viewer into the story. But the absolute control is with the story.
Some of the most memorable films that represent the classical Hollywood cinema are Casablanca, Singing in the Rain, and The Wizard of Oz. It played the major role in transforming the films into the mass popular entertainment and still current filmmakers looks at it for inspiration. That focus on more sound narrative conventions than melodrama helped lay out the primary forms of many modern popular genres such as the thriller, western, and romantic comedy.
German Expressionism
Born in the silent era of the 1920s, German Expressionist filmmaking differed in a unique way through the utilization of exaggeration and the projection of the interior world through the distortion and exaggeration of landscapes and scenes to depict the inner turmoil of the characters and the individual’s perspective of reality. Using the elements of stroboscopic, the inclination of the camera, sharp contrasts of light and dark with heavy shadows rather painted on the walls, and the optical section, German Expressionists painted the scenes that do not have to do with the physical or logical world. The surrealistic sets also served a dual function of offering beauty while suggesting the interiority to be a source of psychic disturbance.
These pioneering movies of the movement that are characterized by an ostentatiously exaggerated mode include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and Metropolis. Psychosis and the mythological creatures are recurring themes of the films. Continuing from the German Expressionism, other film noir styles later emerged in the 1940s, combined with aspects of horror and psychological thriller films.
Italian Neorealism
Born right after the Second World War, Italian Neorealism was born as a cinematic response to the opulence of the Italian cinema of 1930s using themes of stories based among the impoverished and the working class struggling to live in the post-war ruins of Italy. Depicting the destruction that affects cities and countryside, the films made according to the Neorealist style were filmed with the utmost realism at actual locations using only studio light and non-actors. What it lacked in glamour and polish and narrative structure, what it gave up in desperately trying to be a post-war neorealist film, the filmmakers replaced with a rawness and loose structure that only reflected the post-war lives they were portraying. It remains the issue of reflecting the Italian culture of the present days and showcasing the human experience.
Some of the best Italian Neorealist films include Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City and Umberto “D” The impact and effect of Italian Neorealism was such that other cinema of other nations started developing their realist films around the same time In addition, the gritty and immediate impact of the Italian Neorealism has remained very appealing to filmmakers today who wish to convey a very realistic and truthful theme.
French New Wave
It was only with the French New Wave of the late fifties and sixties that the directorial position became a feature through films that were intensely personal, idiosyncratic, and challenging the very concept of what film was all about. Being the most innovative and influential of the movements associated with the rise of the auteurs who refused to obey the Hollywood formula, French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and others made low-budget picture with unprecedented artistic freedom in a visual language, editing and plot which often involve digressive narratives and references to other films. Montage disrupted the editing continuity; characters addressed the audience; plots were told in three acts and left unresolved. This liberated the film from the conventions and standards of the past and began possibilities of what could be done with the medium of film.
The primary of the French New Wave involves films like Breathless, The 400 Blows, Cleo from 5 to 7, Jules and Jim. Since it was a youth-orientated movement, the utterly new and rebellious aesthetic was also one that challenged the previous generation’s lifestyle and morality. The provocatively innovative spirit exemplified by these Cahiers du Cinema critics raised the value of cinema across borders, effectively serving as blueprints for the subsequent New Hollywood period which transplanted their writerly techniques into popular US cinema.
Beyond Multiple Styles Coexisting
The main reason for this is that today’s directors have access to nearly 100 years of film-making history encompassing a plethora of styles; therefore, modern cinema tends to blend elements of various modes of film-making into one film. Directors may combine the structural continuity of the Classical Hollywood cinema with the aberrations of the Expressionism or the raw unpolished style of Neorealism or use postmodern metafictional modes. Quentin Tarantino creates his own offshoots through the films that are highly non-linear and filled with references to the past categorizations.
In the same manner, with the different innovations in future movies, the concepts and styles from the previous films are incorporated and integrated into the new styles of films making, so that the history of film making will always be present in the screens for generations to come. The means of telling stories through cinema are boundless.
