The classical film style of self-restraint

As much as I admire filmmakers with the ambition and technical virtuosity to pull off such bravura pieces of cinema as The Shining, I've come to be just as much in awe of those directors with a willingness to virtually erase their artistic signature in favour of restraint and self-effacement - the classical style of no-style, if you will. This kind of film-making has virtually disappeared in recent years, but it harks back to Hollywood's Golden Age, when directors like George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks made films in which the camera observed from an objective, discreet distance, never moving or cutting away until absolutely necessary. The action was to be found in the words and emotional interaction of the characters, their interplay so rhythmic and dynamic that the films never felt static or overly stagy. The skill here lies in knowing which stories will be enhanced by the style of no-style.

If there was a masterpiece of such cinematic understatement, it was Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film All the President's Men, which looked simple but amounted to a masterfully conceived and well-calibrated collection of canny staging and a wealth of visual detail and bravura - if not obvious - camera moves. For instance, when an overhead camera, observing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they slog through book slips at the Library of Congress, soars high to reduce them to the size of needles in the haystack they are searching, it invests this quiet scene - one that could have been deathly dull - with verve and visual interest in the subtlest way possible. "A story is told as much by what you don't see, what you don't show, as what you show," Pakula explained. "If you show everything, nothing has importance."

- Ann Hornaday, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies, New York, 2017, p.224

See also:
Movies: The refreshingly brutal candour of The RKO Story, 27 July 2021
Movies: The dream factory of old Hollywood, 17 February 2021
Movies: Technicolor fragments from the 1920s, 30 April 2018