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...