Film Art describes a few ways in which an audience member can begin to dissect the style of a film. The first of these is to identify narrative conventions or formal system that essentially make up the organisational structure of the film. For Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence we can start with the way the fact that the film is definitely a narrative film.

It is very obviously an adaptation of a novel as the film only loosely fits a conventional Hollywood three-act structure. The film begins in an opera, a rather disconcerting opera in which you’re not quite sure of the characters or where you are, also the introduction of the two lovers occurs almost immediately in the story. The middle section is a lot of tension and struggle as Newland and Ellen try to break out of the society they inhabit. Finally the ending, shows the acceptance, really, there is no resolution to the narrative at all at the end and this also goes for each individual moment. There is not a lot of reconciliation of plot lines or characters at all in this film and this is often very typical of a dramatic film. Though we’re not talking about genre here, we’re talking about style. The use of techniques is very artistic. We could also similarly say that art is an important motif in the film as in the beginning of the film we are almost surrounded by very elaborate paintings and then in many of the location scenes the frame is almost composed as a painting would be. Most of the other techniques are very conventional, there is not a lot in the way of breaking of stylistic rules however the film is constructed to feel almost as if that society were the ones to shoot it. Even in the scene where the two lovers hold each other, there is a very painted look to it, a somewhat artificial quality.

This system moving from identifying the key narrative organisational system, identifying the techniques and then following them to their intended meaning is the way in which Film Art proposes you identify the style of the film you are viewing. Film Art suggests that you can also use the technical construction of a film to talk about the style of an artist or director and in this case Age of Innocence in many ways ‘breaks’ Scorsese’s style quite substantially.