Film Art Ch 2 - Film Form: The Significance of Film Form

Bordwell, Thompson, & Smith

Film Form

• Film form: system of relationships among film parts
• Mind is never at rest, constantly seeking order and significance - even in everyday life (a friend’s face, a familiar landmark, a sign of rain, etc)
• Film is a system of various parts and if one fails, the whole system suffers
• Film and audience depend on each other - nothing is innate

Film Form vs. Narrative Form & Content

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(one affects the other and vice versa…)

Different Content, Different Form

Similar Content, Different Form

Different Content, Similar Form

Similar Content, Similar Form

Expectations

• Each film has laws and rules - they are systems unto themselves
• Shots are calculated, unlike real-world experience
• See the ordinary in a new way!
• Fresh ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, etc.
• Lemon, Empire, Gladiator, Manhattan, Taxi Driver
• Active audience, not passive - “What’s going to happen next?”
• Suspense, curiosity, peace, laughter, tension, anger, shock, fear, etc.
• Drawing on past experience and knowledge, both audience members and filmmakers
• Formal and content conventions, especially in genre films...
• Suspension of disbelief!
• Semiotics

Semiotics

Semiotics

• “Semiotics tells us things we already know in a language we will never understand.” - Paddy Whannel
• Semiotics is the study of everything that can be used for communication
• Words, images, traffic signs, flowers, music, medical symptoms, etc.
• Semiotics studies the way such “signs” communicate and the rules that govern their use.
• Breaks from traditional forms of criticism because it is concerned with how meaning is created, rather than what the meaning is...

Background

• The term “semiotics” was coined by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce
• Although, his work on semiotics did not gain favor until after his death
• The field was also “invented” by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who used the term “semiology” to describe the science in Course in General Linguistics

Charles S. Peirce

Ferdinand de Saussure

Background Cont...

• Structuralism
• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Stresses that each element within a cultural system derives its meaning from its relationship to every other element in the system: there are no independent meanings, but rather many meanings produced by their difference from other elements in the system. (Fiske…?)
• Used more broadly in literary and media criticism, as well as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, fashion, etc.
• Goes hand-in-hand with semiotics
• Helps connect multiple departments within a university

Claude Levi-Strauss

The Sign

• The smallest unit of meaning in semiotics is called the sign. Semiotics begins with this smallest unit and builds rules for the combination of signs.
• Shift in sciences from perception to models, such that the basic conceptual units organize the data from the outset (atom, phoneme [letters and sounds], etc).
• Two distinct parts (separable only in theory)
• Signifier: image, object, or sound itself - the part of the sign that has a material form
• Signified: the concept it represents
• Relationship between signifier and signified in verbal language is totally arbitrary.
• Words have no positive value, exist in difference - language/words are a “negation” to use Lacanian terms

Arbitrary Relations

• Child
• Kind
• Bambino
• Enfant
• Niño
• Pебенок
• çocuk
• 子ども

• Dog
• Hund
• Chien
• Cane
• Perro
• 狗 or Gǒu
• Shun
• Koira

What about onomatopoeia?

Referents and “Real Objects”

• Sausssure: bracketed off the real objects to which language refers: its referents
• Semiotics does not concern itself with referents
• Some signs have no “real” object to which they refer
• Abstractions: truth, freedom, love, justice, beauty, etc.
• Products of the imagination: mermaids, unicorns, gods and goddesses, etc.
• All signs are cultural constructs that have taken on meaning through repeated, learned, collective use
• Signs that we use to define other signs are interpretants
• Images do not have an unmediated relationship with their referents

Peirce: Icon, Index, and Symbol

• Peirce saw the process of communication as an unending chain of sign production, which he dubbed “unlimited semiosis”
• Three types of signifiers (which frequently overlap):
• Icon: The signifier has a resemblance to the signified. It looks like the thing it is describing. It is a sliding scale of how much it resembles the actual thing.
• Image: simple qualities are alike
• Diagram: relations between the parts are alike
• Index: Physical connection. Smells are indexes. An example of this is smoke - no smoke without fire.
• Symbol: Doesn’t look/sound/smell like what they are describing. Most spoken words are symbols. All typography is a symbol. Road signs are symbols. Culturally constructed connections. Symbols are arbitrary.

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Icon, Index, or Symbol?

Denotation and Connotation

• “In images, denotation is the first order of signification: the signifier is the image itself and the signified is the idea or concept--what it is a picture of.”
• “Connotation is the second-order signifying system that uses the first sign, (signifier and signified), as its signifier and attaches an additional meaning, another signified, to it.”
• Connotation functions on the level of ideology and Myth making according to Barthes

Denotation and Connotation Cont...

There’s much more to Semiotics (which you’ll learn in Film Theory), but that’s enough for now...

Form and Feeling

• Emotions represented vs. emotional response
• slapstick (Dick Van Dyke), slashers (Friday the 13th), dramas (The Champ), action (Armageddon, Armageddon again, Armageddon yet again, and lastly, Armageddon)
• Responses are subjective of course
• The richer our perception and knowledge of formal elements and systems, the deeper and more complex our responses become!

Form and Meaning

• Referential Meaning
• Bare bones plot summary, refers to things already invested with significance.
• Explicit Meaning
• The “point” of the film - still bare bones, but openly asserted meaning.
• Implicit Meaning
• The “subtext” of the film, beneath-the-surface meaning. Intentional or unintentional.
• Symptomatic Meaning
• Abstract and general. Explicit meaning is a manifestation of a wider set of values characteristic of a whole society - same with implicit meanings - ideological. Meanings are largely a social phenomenon, culturally specific, and change over time…
• Filmmakers, audiences, studios, even individual cultures assign/create meaning - meaning is not innate!
• Sometimes the filmmaker guides us, but sometimes we find meanings he/she didn’t intend...

Principles of Film Form

• No “laws” in art, opposed to scientific laws. No absolute principles of art, but…
• 5 general principles in film form
• Function: every element, big or small, fulfills certain roles
• Similarity & Repetition: motifs (any significant repeated element in a film) (Speed 1, 2, 3, 4), parallelisms (comparison of two or more distinct elements by highlighting similarities) (Wizard of Oz 1, 2, 3)
• Difference & Variation: various characters, places, times, colors, sets, textures, speeds, tones.
• Development: How the film gets from beginning, to middle, to end
• Wizard of Oz plot segmentation in the book
• Unity & Disunity: When all relationships in the film are clear and economically interwoven, it has unity (the film is “tight”). Very few films are perfectly tight (Wizard of Oz). Shouldn’t be glaring holes or mistakes unless done so intentionally for surprise, ambiguity, cliffhangers, artistic intent, etc. (Pulp Fiction)