Arnheim on style history

How a historian defines a style class depends upon the proximate mechanisms the historian privileges.1 From these mechanisms, a style’s qualitative parameters or constituent elements, and historical beginnings and endings, are accounted for. Identifying a style depends on a series of complex considerations relating to the nature of artistic intention and agency. Other factors that allow for explanation and periodization include “external, " that is, social, institutional, economic, and technological levers, and “internal” traditions, techniques, and subjects. Remaining only with film, these factors have helped define large-scale group classes like Hollywood classicism, as well as more localized designations like cinema of attractions, Italian neorealism, and the cinéma du look, and individual entities like “early Godard, " "1930s Mizoguchi, " and “Griffith at Biograph.” Each is a style or an episode in a style with distinguishing features and framing dates that are often the subject of principled debate regarding the pertinence of specific kinds of evidence and the appropriate interpretation of this evidence.