Inspired by the recent post by Matt Zoller Seitz, here is an excerpt from Raymond Durgnat's wonderful book, Films and Feelings:
"Similarly a spectator used to looking for detailed psychology, realistic acting, location settings, and so on, may be quite at sea with films whose subtleties are entirely visual ones. Most film critics (outside Italy) have a literary background, and the fact that film, like novels, tell stories, reinforces their tendency to consider the 'core' of film as being somehow 'literary'. Their indebtedness to a (waning) fashion in literary criticism usually leads to the further assumption that the 'core' of literature is 'psychological insights' - exact definition and motives, and so on. To these displaced persons a film's visual qualities are only 'style'... The critics of, for example, Sight and Sound whom... typify a fading English critical orthodoxy, with all its confusions and contradictions - summarizble as: 'literary content' and 'style' are either indistinguishable or the same thing but the first emphatically more important than the second...
Let us first look at the implications of the antithesis of 'content' and 'style'. Among film critics 'content' is equated with 'literary content', that is anything in a film which a novelist could fairly easily put into words if he were writing 'the book of the film'. And 'style' becomes, virtually, anything which isn't 'content'.
In the other arts, the uses of the word 'style' are rather different. In painting 'literary content' is obviously of minor importance, while much great music is absolutely devoid of all 'literary content' whatsoever. By this definition abstract paintings and symphonies would be 'pure' style, altogether devoid of meaning - and importance? Clearly then there must be a sense in which 'style = content'.
The opening definition of 'style' in The Concise O.E.D. is: 'Manner of writing, speaking or doing... as opposed to the matter to be expressed or thing done.' In other words, an artist's 'style' is his answer to the problems with which he is faced in the course of creating his work of art...
Now let us look at 'style' in a medium other than the cinema. Two actors will declaim Shakespeare's words ('content') in altogether different ways ('style'). One makes Hamlet a warrior-hero who can't make up his mind. The other makes him a neurotic intellectual who can't steel himself to action. The 'literary content' is exactly the same but the 'theatrical content' (gesture, voice) is altogether different. So different that it transforms the meaning of the text. Here, the style is just as much a part of the content as the 'content'. In fact much of what film critics call 'literary content' is in fact 'theatrical content', depending less on the text than on acting and staging, and, to this extent, the ordinary fiction film is nearer the theatre than literature.
Of course, not all features of 'style' make much difference to the 'content'. It may make no difference whatsoever whether an actor lifts his left eyebrow before or after he waggles his right finger-tip. This is a change of 'content' too, but only a minor one.
From this definition, the question whether style is more important than content is a misleading one. Style is simply those pieces of content which arise out of the way the artist makes his basic points. These may (as often in painting and poetry) be only a pretext, a wire on which to 'thread the beads'. If style is 'manner of doing', then we can say that the way a thing is done is often a way of doing a different thing. To say 'sorry' superciliously is doing a different thing from saying 'sorry' courteously or servilely, etc. Certain tones of voice make 'sorry' mean: 'Look where you're going, you clumsy imbecile.' 'It ain't what you do it's the way you do it.' 'Le style, c'est l'homme.'
... The distinction between 'literary content' and 'visual style' is particularly misguided because even in the work of literature much of the 'content' comes from the 'style'. Suppose we call someone 'slow but thorough' we feel this is, on the whole, a compliment. His slowness is a trifling disadvantage, the last word acts as a summing-up, an assertion of value. But if we call him 'thorough but slow' there is an implication of criticism. The ideas and the words are exactly the same - but to change their order is like inserting some invisible words. One order says: 'We can rely on him.' The other: 'He should pull his socks up.' More often, literary 'style' is a matter of choosing different words - different ideas, different content. My friends are 'unfaltering', my enemies are 'obstinate'. I show 'intensity of purpose', you are a 'fanatic'. Our friends are 'original', our rivals 'eccentric'. Writers show such concern over points of 'style' because of their concern over points of 'content'.
Such nuances of order, sound, vocabulary and so on, don't just colour the 'content' of a passage. They constitute its content. The passage may be badly written, but of interest as a description of an interesting event - traffic accident, a battle or a riot. But this event is not its 'literary content'. It's only the subject. Another passage may describe an apparently boring event, but bring to it a wealth of ideas and insights. And in this case we may speak of the author's 'style' as enlivening a banal 'content'. But this wealth of ideas and insights isn't 'mere' style - it is 'content'. And, here, to ask whether style or content is more important is like asking whether water is more important than H2O. It is not the importance of their subjects, but the richness of their 'content-style' which distinguishes good artists from mediocre ones.
Another quite common and useful sense of the word 'style' is to refer to the whole mass of details which go into a film but which happen to be confusing and difficult to describe in words. Thus a specific reaction - horror, joy, etc. - tends to be called 'content' because it is easy to define, it offers a nice, solid idea to lean on. On the other hand, an actor's posture, gestures, smiles, the quality of his glance, the tension of his facial muscles, the director's spatial relationships, the tones of grey caught by the cameraman, all these may be very eloquent and forceful in communicating experience (and so are 'content'). But because it is difficult to analyse or explain their exact meaning in words they tend to be referred to, vaguely, as 'style'. But here again 'content' and 'style' are indissoluble. In fact, here the 'content' - horror, joy - is a spectator's deduction from what the screen actually contains. This is why spectator's so often disagree on what a film's content is. The screen contains the style, but the not the content, which is the spectator's deduction, and not contained on the screen at all!"
