This presentation will introduce my research group's work on quantitative historical style analysis, which aims to describe large stylistic trends in the history of cinema and to visualize the development of these trends in space and in time as well as the detailed stylistic genealogy of individual films. Finding connections and attending to development trends is what film critics and historians since André Bazin have been doing intuitively and based on subjective impression and memory. Our ambition, however, is to develop historical style analysis into an accurate method. This, we hope, will help us discover hitherto hidden connections and trends, and explain phenomena, such as film authorship and formal patterns, that have not been well understood in film historiography. The results of the quantitative processing of cinematic forms on a sufficiently large corpus can be visualized with the help of advanced statistical visualization technology.

Workshop with András Bálint Kovács from 2-4 pm, IG Building, Room 7.312 (Film Studies Room). For registration and information contact us at info@kracauer-lectures.de.