Synoptique Style Gallery -- {prefix} {title}

Velvet Goldmine (1998)
Director : Todd Haynes
Written by : Todd Haynes
Cinematographer : Mayrse Alberti

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Timecode: 2m:57s to 4m:21s

Submitted by Brian Crane on November 11 2004.

Description: The opening of the film, just before the title credits. The title card that flashes up reads 'One Hundred Years Later'.

COMMENTS:

Style is not a characteristic of an image or sound track.
Style is not separable from the narrative.
Style is not an aspect of film.
It is the film.

Style is not a sign of art; it is not the conventions that tell us what tradition a film belongs to or why actors moves their body as they do; it is not the extraordinary moment that tells us who made the film; it is not the mask of ideology.

An actor smoking a cigarette; the slow sweep of the camera; the sharp bite of hard-boiled dialogue. All may be stylish. None of them are style.

Style is neither fashion nor taste.

It is never an exercise.

Style: our peculiar recognition of a film?s singularity, of an effect larger than its parts, of a made thing that demands our attention and admits no change that is not a remaking of the whole.

Style is always beautiful.

[ By Brian Crane • November 11, 2004 ]