The critical development in the creation of motion pictures of the last decade and a half has been in the breakdown in the relationship between a movie’s subject matter and a careful consideration of how that content should be constructed visually.  The connection between matter and manner in art is academically referred to as formalism.  The influential French auteurs of the late fifties used the mythically elusive phrase, “mise-en-scene” in their cerebral ruminations about cinematic style.  The greats in the Motion Picture Pantheon (Griffith, Lang, Murnau, Dreyer, Ophüls, Rossellini, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Jean Renoir) all shared the same attribute: they possessed a highly recognizable “mise-en-scene,” in other words, a personal style.

All very heady stuff--and the gang of French film enthusiasts that advanced this theory, namely, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer sought soon afterwards to demonstrate what they meant by making their own pictures in partial tribute to the “auteurs” (literally, authors) who inspired them.

Their influence, like most things reflecting charm and substance, has been rudely jettisoned to make room for a louder, broader circus-like spectacle that makes a mockery of terms suggesting either individuality or style.

In this sense, the cinema is going through a neo-primitive phase very reflective of the culture at large.  With a lack of authentic style among its practitioners, there is neither artistry nor artist; however this inanity of content was preceded by a barbarity of form.

This distressing trend in America’s most indigenous art form gets a brief reprieve when the County Theater Cinemateque at Doylestown exhibits Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s A Chronicle Of Corpses for a theatrical run starting Friday September 21.  Here is a new classic of stylish cinema guaranteed to slake the thirst of the most rabid old timer still retaining memories of the best of Truffaut, Godard, Renais and our country’s own Stanley Kubrick.  In a sense, like the work of the aforementioned masters McElhinney’s A Chronicle Of Corpses (made in the Chestnut Hill area last year) is a mesmerizing, some what mad attempt to take movies back to their roots, to the beginning of their innocent origins; I’m referring to the macabre fairy tales of D.W. Griffith and the extravagant fantasies of Georges Melies and Fritz Lang.  But McElhinney is a modern consciousness and so in order to convey this gloomy tale of bad faith and vengeful murder on a dying 18th Century New England plantation to a contemporary audience, he instinctively gravitates toward a personal style which places quotation marks around the hoary melodrama while at the same time conjuring an aesthetically haunting flow of images.

Thus, McElhinney’s A Chronicle Of Corpses unspools in a series of gorgeously composed, self-contained epiphanies: an ominous tracking camera surveying headstones in a dejected looking Church cemetery, an even more impressive use of the moving camera in a lyrical passage far more predatory and lethal than anything to be seen in The Patriot, a tableau of molten grief between two sisters of sorrow framed in such a way as to linger in the mind’s eye like a Michelangelo frieze, and finally, a wondrously flesh-crawling shot of a monstrously oversized family retainer lurching down a curving flight of stairs, torch in hand, smoke billowing in his wake -- a stolen moment by Dore out of Dante.

McElhinney’s A Chronicle Of Corpses is decidedly not for all tastes -- especially not for those conditioned by the fast food eye candy of the moment.  For the discerning connoisseur, however, this perversely endearing little epic provides plenty to get drunk on.