The Invisible Style 482t10

The invisible style Ray referred the formal paradigm of classical Hollywood as the invisible style, which is systematically developed means to conceal the fundamental choices filmmaking makes on the substance and manners of screen appearance. The invisibility origins form its capacity to conceal the “artificial” choices filmmakers make and simultaneously present a “natural” and acceptable work to the audiences. The necessity to form this invisibility into a classical style is due to the historical context within which “the arrival of sound, intensifying economic concentration, and political crisis” result in the “deliberate evocations of traditional myths” and “a new continuity with American culture” (Ray 32). The primary preposition of the invisible style is the ability to “subordinate every cinematic element to the interests of a movie’s narrative” (Ray 32). American culture has long preferred the story of a movie rather than the format style. This habit directly results in the substantial assumption; that the audiences are guaranteed the most engaging and thorough viewpoint of a scene. To avoid breaking this implied contract and provoke the audiences, filmmaking in classical Hollywood exploited and formed every possible element of a movie in the invisible style. The tactics filmmakers used, -- centralized mise-en-scene, the disguised inherently discontinuous editing and the compelling narratives (which is also part of the ‘centralized mise-en-scene’), all serve to create an illusion of reality. The invisible style aims to efface every left over trace from the often and obvious repetition of the certain movie patterns and thus convince the audiences again of the movie’s the realistic story and ideology other than aesthetic man-made convention behind the scene. The main accomplishment of invisible style in mise-en-scene is to centralize the ongoing narrative as the priority. The invisible style does not highlight the narrative directly. It achieves its goal by subordinating or even undermining the possible uniqueness of other elements such as lighting, camera angle, framing, costuming, etc. to guarantee the interest of the primary narrative. Editing, as a different approach, develops to serve the same need of centralizing narratives. The stylistic invisibility disguised the “inherent discontinuity” of editing to protect “spatial and temporal

continuity from shot to shot” (Ray 38). The achievement depends mainly on the success of shots matching and the shot-reverse shot technique called 180-degree system. Successively matched shots with graphic similarities, action continuity, glance connection and thus are intentionally chosen with the mission of running the movie naturally. A ostensibly contradicting yet successfully recursive property of invisibility occurs here because the more deliberate and sophisticated the technique to match is, the more natural and invisible the style is. The second strategy – shot-reverse shot technique serves the invisible style in two ways; to “include the audience in the mental and ‘physical’ space of the diegesis of the movie”, and to “attribute a high percentage of a movie’s shots to a source within the film” (Ray 39). This technique make the film immersive enough for the audiences to forget they are shown from the view point of the filmmaker. The concealment of choices is achieved by naturalizing the viewpoints within the scene. When everything on the screen seems and feels “real, unsponsored, and inevitable” (Ray 39) to the audience, people would not notice the numerous deliberate choices made behind the scenes. These two factors – invisible techniques on mis-en-scene and editing, combined effectively to form compelling narratives. The invisible style’s success lies on the glaring stylistic mechanics with no blankness in between spaces to allow audiences wonder and inquiry the real possibility of the plots. It attracts, absorbs and immerses the audiences in the film’s world without them even noticing this is a deliberate invisible yet visually and emotionally pleasing trap.