B0041VYHGW EBOK (24 page)

If the filmmaker can’t avoid connecting to both art and the larger world, neither can the audience. When we respond to cues in the film, we call on our prior experiences of everyday life and of other artworks. You were able to play the ABAC game because you had learned the alphabet. You may have learned it in everyday life (in a classroom or from your parents) or from an artwork (as some children now learn the alphabet from television cartoons). Similarly, we are able to recognize the journey pattern in
The Wizard of Oz.
We’ve taken trips and we’ve seen other films organized around this pattern (such as
Stagecoach
or
North by Northwest
), and the convention is to be found in other artworks, such as Homer’s
Odyssey
and J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.

In recognizing film form, then, the audience must be prepared to understand formal cues through knowledge of life and of other artworks. But what if the two principles come into conflict? In ordinary life, people don’t simply start to sing and dance, as they do in
The Wizard of Oz.
Very often conventions demarcate art from life, saying implicitly, “In artworks of this sort, the laws of everyday reality don’t operate. By the rules of
this
game, something ‘unreal’
can
happen.” All stylized art, from opera, ballet, and pantomime to slapstick comedy, depends on the audience’s willingness to suspend the laws of ordinary experience and to accept particular conventions. It is simply beside the point to insist that such conventions are unreal or to ask why Tristan sings to Isolde or why Buster Keaton doesn’t smile. Very often the most relevant prior experience for perceiving form is not everyday experience but previous encounters with works having similar conventions.

Further, artworks can create new conventions. A highly innovative work can at first seem odd because it refuses to conform to the norms we expect. Cubist painting, the French “New Novel” of the 1950s, and ambient music seemed bizarre initially because of their refusal to adhere to conventions. But a closer look may show that an unusual artwork has its own rules, creating an unorthodox formal system that we can learn to recognize and respond to. Eventually, the new systems offered by such unusual works may themselves furnish conventions and thus create new expectations.

Certainly, emotion plays a large role in our experience of form. To understand this role, let’s distinguish between
emotions represented
in the artwork and an
emotional response
felt by the spectator. If an actor grimaces in agony, the emotion of pain is represented within the film. If, however, the viewer who sees the painful expression laughs (as the viewer of a comedy might), the emotion of amusement is felt by the spectator. Both types of emotion have formal implications.

Emotions represented within the film interact as parts of the film’s total system. For example, that grimace of pain might be consistent with the character’s response to bad news. A character’s sly expression may prepare us for the later revelation of his or her villainous side. Or a cheerful scene might stand in contrast to a mournful one. A tragic event might be undercut by light-hearted music. All emotions present in a film may be seen as systematically related to one another through that film’s form.

The spectator’s emotional response to the film is related to form as well. We have just seen how cues in the artwork interact with our prior experience, especially our experience of artistic conventions. Often form in artworks appeals to ready-made reactions to certain images (for example, involving sexuality, race, or social class). But form can create new responses instead of harping on old ones. Just as formal conventions often lead us to suspend our normal sense of real-life experience, so form may lead us to override our everyday emotional responses. People whom we would despise in life may become spellbinding as characters in a film. We can be enthralled by a film about a subject that normally bores us. One cause of these experiences lies in the systematic way we become involved in form. In
The Wizard of Oz,
we might, for example, find the land of Oz far more attractive than Kansas. But because the film’s form leads us to sympathize with Dorothy in her desire to go home, we feel great satisfaction when she finally returns to Kansas.

It is first and foremost the dynamic aspect of form that engages our feelings. Expectation, for instance, spurs emotion. To have an expectation about “what happens next” is to invest some emotion in the situation. Delayed fulfillment of an expectation—suspense—may produce anxiety or sympathy. (Will the detective find the criminal? Will boy get girl? Will the melody return?) Gratified expectations may produce a feeling of satisfaction or relief. (The detective solves the mystery; boy does get girl; the melody returns one more time.) Cheated expectations and curiosity about past material may produce puzzlement or keener interest. (So he isn’t the detective? This isn’t a romance story? Has a second melody replaced the first one?)

Note that all of these possibilities
may
occur. There is no general recipe for concocting a novel or film to produce the “correct” emotional response. It is all a matter of context—that is, of the particular system that is each artwork’s overall form. All we can say for certain is that the emotion felt by the spectator will emerge from the totality of formal relationships she or he perceives in the work. This is one reason why we should try to notice as many formal relations as possible in a film; the richer our perception, the deeper and more complex our response may become.

Taken in context, the relations between the feelings represented in the film and those felt by the spectator can be quite complicated. Let’s take an example. Many people believe that no more sorrowful event can occur than the death of a child. In most films, this event would be represented so as to summon up the sadness we would also feel in life. But the power of artistic form can alter the emotional tenor of even this event. In Jean Renoir’s
The Crime of M. Lange,
the cynical publisher Batala rapes and abandons Estelle, a young laundress. After Batala disappears, Estelle becomes integrated into the neighborhood and returns to her former fiancé. But Estelle is pregnant by Batala and bears his child.

The scene when Estelle’s employer, Valentine, announces that the child was born dead is one of the most emotionally complex in cinema. The first reactions represented are solemnity and sorrow
(
2.2
).
Suddenly, Batala’s cousin remarks, “Too bad. It was a relative.” In the film’s context, this is taken as a joke
(
2.3
).
The shift in the emotion represented in the film catches us off guard. Since these characters are not heartless, we must readjust our reaction to the death and respond as they do—with relief. Estelle’s survival is far more important than the death of Batala’s child. The film’s formal development has rendered appropriate a reaction that might be perverse in ordinary life. This is a daring, extreme example, but it dramatically illustrates how both emotions onscreen and our responses depend on the context created by form.

Like emotion,
meaning
is important to our experience of artworks. As an alert perceiver, the spectator is constantly testing the work for larger significance, for what it says or suggests. The sorts of meanings that the spectator attributes to a film may vary considerably. Let’s look at four things we might say about the meaning of
The Wizard of Oz.

1.
Referential meaning.
During the Depression, a tornado takes a girl from her family’s Kansas farm to the mythical land of Oz. After a series of adventures, she returns home.

This is very concrete, close to a bare-bones plot summary. Here the meaning depends on the spectator’s ability to identify specific items: the hard times of America in the 1930s and features of midwestern climate. A viewer unacquainted with such information would miss some of the meanings cued by the film. We can call such tangible meanings
referential,
since the film refers to things or places already invested with significance.

A film’s subject matter—in
The Wizard of Oz,
American farm life in the 1930s—is often established through referential meaning. And, as you might expect, referential meaning functions within the film’s overall form, in the way that we have argued that the subject of the Civil War functions within
The Birth of a Nation.
Suppose that instead of having Dorothy live in flat, spare, rural Kansas, the film made Dorothy a child living in Beverly Hills. When she got to Oz (transported there, perhaps, by a hillside flash flood), the contrast between the crowded opulence of Oz and her home would not have been nearly as sharp. Here the referential meanings of Kansas play a definite role in the overall contrast of settings that the film’s form creates.

2.
Explicit meaning.
A girl dreams of leaving home to escape her troubles. Only after she leaves does she realize how much she loves her family and friends.

This assertion is still fairly concrete in the meaning it attributes to the film. If someone were to ask you the
point
of the film—what it seems to be trying to get across—you might answer with something like this. Perhaps you would also mention Dorothy’s closing line, “There’s no place like home,” as a summary of what she has learned. Let us call this sort of openly asserted meaning an
explicit meaning.

Like referential meanings, explicit meanings function within the film’s overall form. They are defined by context. For instance, we might want to take “There’s no place like home” as a statement of the meaning of the entire film. But, first,
why
do we take that as a strongly meaningful line? In ordinary conversation, it’s a cliché. In context, however, the line gains great force. It’s uttered in close-up, it comes at the end of the film (a formally privileged moment), and it refers back to all of Dorothy’s desires and ordeals, recalling the film’s narrative movement toward her goal. It is the
form
of the film that gives the homily an unfamiliar weight.

This example suggests that we must examine how explicit meanings in a film interact with other elements of the overall system. If “There’s no place like home” adequately and exhaustively summarizes the meaning of
The Wizard of Oz,
no one need ever see the film; the summary would suffice. But like feelings, meanings are born from the dynamics of form. They play a part along with other elements to make up the total system.

Usually, we can’t isolate a particularly significant moment and declare it to be
the
meaning of the whole film. Dorothy’s “There’s no place like home,” however strong as a summary of
one
meaningful element in
The Wizard of Oz,
must be placed in the context of the film’s entire beguiling Oz fantasy. If “There’s no place like home” were the whole point of the film, why is there so much that is pleasant in Oz? The explicit meanings of a film arise from the
whole
film and are set in dynamic formal relation to one another.