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This chapter discusses the influence of the naturalist tradition on early French cinema, covering the pictorialist naturalist school of the 1920s, the cycles of Zola adaptations that appeared between 1902 and 1938, and the ‘social-realist’ cinema of Renoir. The categorical map of the significant realist French film production of the 1930–8 period is meant to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. The chapter emphasizes that La Bête humaine focuses on a disturbing and morally corrupt social order, which conforms closely to one of the most important features of the critical realist/naturalist tradition in its employment of an indeterminate aesthetic style. It concludes by accounting for Renoir's La Bête humaine in terms of the model of critical realism.

This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the Indian cinema has acquired evidently postmodern qualities and explains what postmodernism means in the context of Bollywood cinema. It also considers what postmodernism tells us about the change and function of Bollywood film language after the twenty-first century. The book describes Bollywood's ‘postmodern turn’ as a form of transformation that reworks or revisits previous aesthetic trends in order to produce a radically different aesthetic. ‘New Bollywood’ refers to contemporary films characterised by a strong postmodern aesthetic style which was not as present in the 1990s. This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of ‘contemporary Bollywood’, postmodernism as a means of reading and interpreting films, and the structure of the book.

Comics consists of four graphic threads: narrative breakdown, panel composition, page layout, and style. According to Robert C. Harvey, style is the “most illusive” and hardest to account for among these elements, and is difficult to quantify using a linguistic semiotic model based on a decomposable system of units. Moreover, drawing style is extremely qualitative and impressionistic. This chapter examines the aesthetic style of comics by analyzing two texts based on the standard practices of formalist art criticism: Charles Burns’s Black Hole and Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brülightly. It describes what Joshua Taylor calls the “expressive content” of artworks and analyzes the impact of comics’ stylistic elements, such as line and brushwork, light and shadow, texture, mass, order, proportion, balance, pattern, figures, and composition. The chapter offers close readings of pictures in Black Hole and Britten and Brülightly in the context of their particular drawing styles. It also considers the impressionistic responses triggered by particular line styles and discusses how a formal critique of a comics text differs from the sort of works traditionally examined as fine art.

Franz Schubert died young, and therefore for him the witticism that all of his are ‘early works’ is an appropriate one. Still, can one really subject Schubert’s last works to the aesthetic discussion of late style? The last works of mature composers such as Bach, Haydn, Beethoven or Schoenberg evince a definable late style solely on chronological grounds, and whether that can be transferred to Schubert is uncertain. Nonetheless there is in Schubert’s work around 1824 a leap in quality, which has led to those features in style which, in the course of music history, have had a growing influence on composers, interpreters and recipients. They will be pursued in depth in the proposed essay, because more important than the question of the adequate naming of this formative style is the recognition that the instrumental and vocal works composed from 1824 onwards represent a turning point which, alongside Beethoven’s late style, belongs to the most historically powerful, compositionally paradigmatic changes of the nineteenth century.