THE SHAPE OF 1999
Barry Salt · New Review of Film and Television Studies · 2004
This paper applies the methods of statistical style analysis, which the author devised for film analysis in the late 1960s, to a random selection of 20 American films made in 1999. The paper collects data on the following dimensions of these films: average shot length, shot scale, camera movement, reverse angles, point of view (POV), and inserts. The author analyses the resulting data and compares it to data he collected on previous decades of American filmmaking. He concludes that contemporary American films are made according to an increasingly restricted stylistic norm, characterised mainly by faster cutting and closer shooting.