Beyond media history: the challenge of visual style

The issue of visual style in British film and television has, until recently, received relatively little serious critical attention. During the 1930s, the received wisdom, which mainly emerged from Ivor Montagu's English translation of Pudovkin's Film Technique and from the screenings of the Film Society, was that it as montage, or more prosaically editing, that lay at the heart of a film's visual style. Hitchcock sought to cut his films in the camera, this giving his editor little room to manoeuvre, while Thorold Dickinson and Sidney Cole, two members of the Committee of the Film Society, theorised about the relations between editing style and musical form.