Notes for a Future Manifesto

With all due respect to Nadel (and to Santoro himself, who chose the pseudonym in the first place), I don’t find Storeyville particularly Sirkian. Throughout his career, Douglas Sirk followed dominant Hollywood practices. His films stick close to classical storytelling and to what film scholar David Bordwell calls invisible style, the use of such formal properties as camera movements, editing, and setting to transmit the plot without calling attention to themselves. Invisible style is easiest to define by counter-example: the wild, hand-held camera movements in The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2007) are not examples of invisible style.

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This technique subverts a formal trope that most comics fans take for granted: readability. When Art Spiegelman says that it’s harder to “not read Bushmiller’s Nancy than it is to read it,” he points to the general expectation among readers that a comic should be easy to read, that its pictures (and combination of pictures and words) should be immediately “legible” to us, that form should seamlessly, effortlessly and invisibly convey the narrative. It’s harder to read Storeyville than not, however, because Santoro doesn’t really care about staying on model; he’s more interested in expanding the vocabulary of comics by using marks, colors and lines as non-narrative elements of design and emotional expression.

Fischer, Craig. “Storeyville (Craig Replies).” Thought Balloonists 12 March 2008.

I’ve been reading a lot of Bordwell, but I haven’t come across this “invisible style” concept yet. It’s a useful term. That type of style can be the hardest to discuss, because it is so unnoticeable.

But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in time (during class? before class started?), invites us to apply metaphors, especially once we learn her name. Pascal’s thorny hair suggests not only extraterrestrials but the explosion of a nova. The silhouetted prof, detached from the mechanism he has set in motion, hints at an unknown deity watching the game play out according to his rules. Why do Godard films spawn long essays built out of erudite associations? Because the narrative progression relaxes and we can weave our own connotations out of what we see and hear.

If you don’t want to go down the expanding-association route, there’s another one open. When individual moments no longer accumulate ordinary dramatic pressure, we can savor the fugitive pleasures of the separate shots (light on face, lips by ear) and the patterns they form: flipover cuts, yellow hair and yellow facets, bookended shots of Eva at the window.

Those patterns, it should be clear, depend on our sensing a bump at every shot change, looking for a way to skip across the gap that Godard creates. The same belief that meaning and effect are born of gaps impelled Kuleshov too, and perhaps even Lloyd. If we pay attention to those gaps we can feel minds—both the filmmaker’s and ours—at work in them.

David Bordwell on Godard’s Je vous salue Marie and constructive editing. “What happens between shots happens between your ears.” Observations on film art and FILM ART. Feb 8, 2008.