Reviews for Film Style & Technology History and Analysis

The average rating for Film Style & Technology History and Analysis based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-28 00:00:00 Courtney Spellicy In many ways, this is the premier book on film; a staggering achievement. Salt was a lone voice in the academic miasma. In fact, he pretty much puts all other film scholars to shame by putting under a harsh clear light the ahistorical laziness of dogmatic theoretical approaches. He has zero truck with film theory. As a theoretical physicist, he is only interested in a scientific and archeological evidence-based approach to arrive at the facts. Film theory is anacronistic, as it overlays upon films later assumptions or social constructs that tell us little or nothing about the actual films themselves, how they were actually made and how they fit within the context of their times. Salt backs his analysis of the evolution of filmmaking, narrative approaches to storytelling and the hard technical aspects entirely with thorough knowledge and clear evidence. Philosophy and social sciences are one thing, but homework is another. He has done his. His skewering of nonsensical and often irrelevant competing theories of film that push and justify political and contemporary social agendas is so devastatingly spot-on that his book was actively opposed by the very academics whose livelihoods depend on pushing such hogwash on impressionable students. As a result, this book has had a hard time finding its audience and proper distribution. And, it's clear that Salt, from his introduction, has borne a chip on his shoulder as a result of this treatment. Whatever the case, this book is quite an achievement. I have not read all of it by a long shot, but what I have read has been eye-opening. It is definitely NOT for the casual film reader, but for the most serious researcher. (KevinR@Ky, amended 2016)

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-25 00:00:00 Darryl Sherman This is the first truly formal study of film, which results with a thorough examination of how shooting practices, editing, especially cutting, etc. changed throughout history, but Salt is so bitterly positivist in his approach that it is obsolete. His main motivation to write the book in the first place seems to be his radical denial of any previous analysis, as he considers all of them to be mystifying and useless. Salt is very proud of his background in natural science, but also points out how unrecognized his genius is in the field - one wonders how is that. The militancy of his theoretical persuasion, unconstructive critique of previous approaches, as well as his reduction of film’s formal questions to banality such as frames' duration through history unsurprisingly makes every other scholar in the field uncomfortable. Salt's study has value, but he overestimates it. The sample he is working on is rather restricted, unrepresentative. He is for sure someone who has allegedly seen many films, but he himself points out that he cannot really talk much about anything else but the Hollywood canon. He is also terribly bad at stylistic analysis, if he engages in any. Overall, his book ends up as a catalogue of titles, which has some use, but other than that, reading it feels like working with the material made by someone who has nothing to say and everything to stand against. He aimed at such a great scope of his study, yet ended up getting lost in oversimplification and subjective connection of information. The warmest suggestion would be to read David Bordwell instead.