The parsing on this site by Rachel Arons of Steven Soderbergh’s mashup of the two “Psycho”s—Alfred Hitchcock’s and Gus Van Sant’s—gives rise to questions about the substance of style and the meaning of form that are latent in virtually every movie and explicit in some of the great ones.

There’s a project that I’ve had in mind for decades: researching newsreel and home-movie footage from the high-studio age of the thirties and forties and comparing the way that non-actors looked and behaved, in public and in private, with the way that actors looked and behaved in Hollywood movies made at the same time. All movies are time capsule of styles and artifacts, but they also give the impression of being time capsules of manners, and I’ve often been curious to do a practical experiment to see the extent of the reflection of life in the movies—and, vice versa, the influence of cinematic styles on civilian life.

Famously, Jean-Luc Godard said, in an interview in Le Monde at the time of the release of “Breathless,” “This film is a documentary about Jean Seberg and about Jean-Paul Belmondo.” And so it is—and only partially because of the director’s ideas and efforts. All films (asterisk: all live-action films), whatever else they are, are documentaries about their actors, all of them, from the stars through the extras. But that documentary content goes far beyond the recording of their intentional and calculated way of performing.

In watching movies from earlier times—especially from fifty or more years ago—I’m struck by differences in behavior that seem to arise not from theatrical training or directorial influence but from the actors’ fundamental, deeply inculcated, and likely unconscious bearing. The way that people carry themselves—their posture, their gestures, and even the micro-gestures, the sense of sharpness or tremulousness, the brusqueness or smoothness of movements, the pointedness or curves of joints, the decisive rapidity or easy offhandedness with which they move, and the precision or meander of speech—conveys more about their personality and their times than the overt signifiers of fashion or vocabulary.

It’s the micro-gestures, the inner sense of bearing, that ring most strangely in Gus Van Sant’s version of “Psycho.” But those micro-gestures actually occur on both sides of the camera. Godard told the story of when he and Jean-Pierre Gorin, working together sometime in the early nineteen-seventies, attempted an experiment: to imitate a single shot from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.” He explained that they didn’t manage to do it—that the framing and the angle completely escaped them. I’m not surprised—in exactly the same way as I doubt whether Eisenstein, had he lived longer, could have copied perfectly a shot of Godard’s. The camera operator’s own gestures, the particular equipment that’s available, and—yes—the very carriage of the actor being filmed all determine the nature of a shot.

There’s no such thing as a pure angle or composition, any more than there is such a thing as a pure performance; the life of the creators are embodied in all the actions that bring a movie into being. And those habits of body are no mere accidents of upbringing but the very essence of a zeitgeist, of the spirit of the time as it manifests itself. The angles have been lost for the same reason that people move differently; people move differently because of differences in the way that people are raised and educated and influenced, because of differences in thought and feeling, in essential self-image.

When Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” came out, I wrote about a shift in styles in male performance that emerged in the wake of the “new freedoms” of the sixties, when the critique of power took precedence over power, when morality took precedence over martial virtue, when youth took precedence over adulthood. One of the enduring fascinations of that movie is the preternatural intensity of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s drive to convey a postwar mentality in his manner, even as he suggests the painful bonds of self-discipline by which this manner was achieved. The Master’s self-mastery, so to speak, wasn’t unique to him. It was a product of a particular time with its particular attitudes—and their particularly rigid demands.

The discipline suggests the repression of much that, according the norms of the time, couldn’t be shown or said—the tension, the angular precision of gestures even in repose, the precision of diction reflect the sense of living up to a standard of quasi-theatrical performance even in intimate life. By contrast, the habitual slackness of the modern performer (and I don’t mean lack of training, ability, or hard work), the automatic rounding of corners and looseness of limbs and gazes, reflects a fundamental lack of fear, a sense of impunity regarding the spontaneous and natural inclination—a lack of fear that has been ingrained from early years.

This is true of camera angles, of the shot-by-shot construction of movies, too. Much is made about the change (supposedly for the worse) in directorial habits, especially regarding action sequences that are done as a rapid series of shaky or fast-panning shots that convey an over-all sense of motion. These sequences offer a set of impressions of turbulence or chaos from which details and feelings stand out, but without regard to what is considered a cardinal virtue: the coherent representation of the field of action. Yet is the quickly panning camera an image of inclusiveness, of seeking the action beyond the action, the off-screen space where something else that has often been excluded may be occurring? Does it suggest a change in attitude toward war and violence, moving away from the detached strategies of the officers’ battle plan and presenting, instead, the kinetic terror of the infantryman? Does it suggest that few directors and cinematographers have first-hand experience of war—and that even those who do are uninhibited now (as their counterparts might not have been seventy years ago) to represent the fear and the confusion of a deadly fight?

In any case, the camera often moves and shakes in civilian settings, which matches the wavering looseness of modern people in freed-up modern societies. The beloved visual styles of the classic cinema are also involuntary representations of their very mechanism of repression. In some ways, in some places (and I’m writing about the American scene), some things get objectively better, including a decrease in discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference; an increase in the exposure of private misdeeds and the understanding of their significance in the public realm; a level of freedom of expression that would have been almost inconceivable fifty, even forty years ago.

The diversity of modern cinematic modes follows along. The beloved precision of the classic high-studio style (yes, there are many sub-styles, the work of many different artists and their different points of view) gave rise to a realm of symbolic hints by which the inexpressible was conveyed and the unrepresentable was conjured. If there’s a seeming thinness in the modern cinema, it’s due to the transfer from the symbolic to the representational. The classic movie suggests more than it shows. The modern movie has an almost profligate plenitude that has to be reduced to get at the subject.

That’s why Van Sant’s attempt to remake “Psycho” is more or less beside the point, an experiment that proves only its own inadequacy. What it doesn’t represent is the only point of interest in the project: the nostalgia, the search for lost times and lost ways, that prompts it. Filmmakers with a profound and self-conscious sense of the cinema as a time capsule have made use of that nostalgia, have made it their subject for some of their greatest films. The art of filming what no longer is—as in Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” Max Ophuls’s “Lola Montès,” Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” or Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (which opens today)—is also the art of showing the way things are, profoundly, in the present day.