MAKING STYLE WORK
In the realm of aesthetics, stylistic choices have had a direct bearing on the figuration of labor and labor-power within the works themselves. Whether Neorealist or Expressionist, Dogme or Cinema Novo, the sense of style sits uneasily between genre-claims and tautologies about authorship. For Bourdieu, style is a cognitive acquirement that performs a “decoding operation” (1984). In Dick Hebdige’s analysis of subcultures, stylistic choices are the medium through which subjects communicate a sense of oppositionality and subversion (1979). Style can be thought of as a form of processual representation that depicts work “as approaching the magic standard of zero labor” (Skvirsky 2020). And perhaps the question of style can be understood as gimmicky, “simultaneously overperforming and underperforming” (Ngai 2020). How do the problems of style reveal something about the collective media arts and their labor(s)?
The question of style has been oft-elided. What is the relationship between the film’s production and the field within which it is interpreted?