  In his pathbreaking study of what he called “classical film theory,” Noël Carroll (1988) argued that there were many illicit presuppositions at play in the classical theorists' attempts to define film's nature. In particular, he accused them of confusing particular styles of filmmaking with more abstract claims about the nature of the medium itself. His accusations seemed to spell the end of such attempts to justify film styles by their grounding in the medium's nature.