A person can learn quite a bit by watching neighbors working on a similar task, and David Bordwell’s new book on the status of visual style in film history raises anew the issue for art historians, who supposedly invented the concept. Bordwell is a distinguished historian of film at the University of Wisconsin, who has authored and co-authored (usually with Kristin Thompson) monographs (The Cinema of Eisenstein), period histories (The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960), general histories (Film History: An Introduction), and critical appraisals of theory and method in his own discipline (Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies). He also makes frequent citations to fundamental art-historical publications, ranging from Gombrich to Baxandall, as well as a host of commentators on modernism and postmodernism. So there are many reasons to turn to this book for a thoughtful index of where style concerns stand in the sister discipline of film history. In many ways this is, more precisely, a book of historiography, akin to the recent art-historical publications reconsidering the history of art history, from Vasari to Podro’s “critical historians of art.” Yet almost no field of the humanities has been so dominated by theory as film studies....