When Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct was resurrected a few years after his death at a communist party rally, and when film enthusiasts continued to demand to experience this vision that failed in its own era to find an audience, we pronounced him prophetic. While Vigo and Renoir surely hungered for contemporary success, they just as surely aimed to change the rules of artistic discourse so that their films could be received by a culture ready for them. If it took years for these changes to come into effect, if Rules of the Game is often cited today as the greatest French film, although Renoir madly recut it to help stave off the utter disdain with which it was received in 1939, we cannot say that such films are not of their times. This is hardly a new problem in the history of art, but it is a problem the cinema raises most insistently, and raises, I think, in a way that can be treated. We are accustomed to histories of art or literature that wander from lone genius to lone genius, isolating the stylistic glories each was able to achieve.
Style here is the personal, nontransferable character of a discourse.
Its opposite, in Roland Barthes's famous scheme, is language, the bare rules of discourse that force themselves on all who would be heard. In art history we can think of language as the ruling systems or conventions at play in various epochs. Thus Rubens was a shining genius, twisting the language of the baroque to his own design. The same holds true in literature where we treat Wordsworth as an inimitable soul who gave to the romanticism of his age a peculiar sound and feel. The very business of cinema, with its problems of distribution, censorship, limited production, and collaborative labor, makes us see it as the site of fights over the nature of representation, over the right to represent experience in a particular way.