The shape of 1959

Abstract

When I wrote ‘The Shape of 1999’ (2004), I was aware that the comparison I made between the stylistics of my sample of American films from that year, and those of earlier times, was not as well supported as it might have been. Although I made reference to the general statistics for hundreds of American films which were given in my Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (1992), most of those were from the 1940s or earlier, and with only a few from the 1950s onwards. So to remedy that defect, this paper will use an expanded comparison of my 1999 sample with a sample of 20 films from 1959, to give a more absolute demonstration of the general stylistic changes of American feature films over the 40 years from 1959 to 1999. This time span is sometimes said to encompass major changes in film style, but just how true is that? In the process of investigating this last point, I will introduce one or two new stylistic measures to deal with shot to shot continuity.