Authors: David Bordwell,Kristin Thompson
B0041VYHGW EBOK (29 page)
2.19 The visits of the final scene.
Earlier, we suggested that film form engages our emotions and expectations in a dynamic way. Now we are in a better position to see why. The constant interplay between similarity and difference, and repetition and variation, leads the viewer to an active engagement with the film’s developing system. It may be handy to visualize a movie’s development in static terms by segmenting it, but we ought not to forget that formal development is a
process.
Form shapes our experience of the film.
All of the relationships among elements in a film create the total filmic system. Even if an element seems utterly out of place in relation to the rest of the film, we cannot really say that it isn’t part of the film. At most, the unrelated element is enigmatic or incoherent. It may be a flaw in the otherwise integrated system of the film—but it does affect the whole film.
When all the relationships we perceive within a film are clear and economically interwoven, we say that the film has
unity.
We call a unified film tight, because there seem to be no gaps in the formal relationships. Every element present has a specific set of functions, similarities and differences are determinable, the form develops logically, and no element is superfluous. In turn, the film’s overall unity gives our experience a sense of completeness and fulfillment.
Unity is, however, a matter of degree. Almost no film is so tight as to leave no ends dangling. For example, at one point in
The Wizard of Oz,
the Witch refers to her having attacked Dorothy and her friends with insects, yet we have never seen them, and the mention becomes puzzling. In fact, a sequence of a bee attack was originally shot but then cut from the finished film. The Witch’s line about the insect attack now lacks motivation. More striking is a dangling element at the film’s end: we never find out what happens to Miss Gulch. Presumably, she still has her legal order to take Toto away, but no one refers to this in the last scene. The viewer may be inclined to overlook this disunity, however, because Miss Gulch’s parallel character, the Witch, has been killed off in the Oz fantasy, and we don’t expect to see her alive again. Since perfect unity is scarcely ever achieved, we ought to expect that even a unified film may still contain a few unintegrated elements or unanswered questions.
If we look at unity as a criterion of evaluation, we may judge a film containing several unmotivated elements as a failure. But unity and disunity may be looked at nonevaluatively as well, as the results of particular formal conventions. For example,
Pulp Fiction
lacks a bit of closure in that it never reveals what is inside a briefcase that is at the center of the gangster plot. The contents, however, give off a golden glow, suggesting that they are of very great value (as well as evoking the “whatsit” in
Kiss Me Deadly,
a classic film noir). By not specifying the goods, the film invites us to compare characters’ reactions to them—most notably, in the last scene in the diner, when Pumpkin gazes at it lustfully and the newly spiritual hitman Jules calmly insists that he will deliver it to his boss. In such ways, momentary disunities contribute to broader patterns and thematic meanings.
CONNECT TO THE BLOG
One distinctive type of film form comes in the anthology film, combining short segments by several directors. It’s a theme-and-variations approach that we discuss in “Can you spot all the auteurs in this picture?”
If one issue has governed our treatment of aesthetic form, it might be said to be
concreteness.
Form is a specific system of patterned relationships that we perceive in an artwork. Such a concept helps us understand how even elements of what is normally considered content—subject matter, or abstract ideas—take on particular functions within any work.
Our experience of an artwork is also a concrete one. Picking up cues in the work, we frame specific expectations that are aroused, guided, delayed, cheated, satisfied, or disturbed. We undergo curiosity, suspense, and surprise. We compare the particular aspects of the artwork with things that we know from life and with conventions found in art.
The concrete context of the artwork expresses and stimulates emotions. It enables us to construct many types of meanings. And even when we apply general criteria in evaluating artworks, we ought to use those criteria to help us discriminate more, to penetrate more deeply into the particular aspects of the artwork. The rest of this book is devoted to studying these properties of artistic form in cinema.
We can summarize the principles of film form as a set of questions that you can ask about any film:
- For any element in the film, what are its functions in the overall form? How is it motivated?
- Are elements or patterns repeated throughout the film? If so, how and at what points? Are motifs and parallelisms asking us to compare elements?
- How are elements contrasted and differentiated from one another? How are different elements opposed to one another?
- What principles of progression or development are at work throughout the form of the film? More specifically, how does a comparison of the beginning and ending reveal the overall form of a film?
- What degree of unity is present in the film’s overall form? Is disunity subordinate to the overall unity, or does disunity dominate?
In this chapter, we examined some major ways in which films as artworks can engage us as spectators. We also reviewed some broad principles of film form. Armed with these general principles, we can press on to distinguish more specific
types
of form that are central to understanding film art.
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
Many of the ideas in this chapter are based on ideas of form to be found in other arts. All of the following constitute helpful further reading: Monroe Beardsley,
Aesthetics
(New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1958), especially
chaps. 4
and
5
; Rudolf Arnheim,
Art and Visual Perception
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), especially
chaps. 2
,
3
, and
9
; Leonard Meyer,
Emotion and Meaning in Music
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); and E. H. Gombrich,
Art and Illusion
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).
On the relation of form to the audience, see the book by Meyer mentioned above. The ABACA example is borrowed from Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s excellent study of literary form,
Poetic Closure
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Compare Kenneth Burke’s claim: “Form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.” (See Kenneth Burke, “Psychology and Form,” in
Counter-Statement
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957],
pp. 29
–44.)
This chapter presupposes that any filmmaker uses basic formal principles. But is the filmmaker fully aware of doing so? Many filmmakers use formal principles intuitively, but others apply them quite deliberately. Spike Lee’s cinematographer Ernest Dickerson remarks, “A motif we used throughout
[School Daze]
was two people in profile, ‘up in each other’s face.’ That was a conscious decision” (
Uplift the Race: The Construction of “School Daze”
[New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988],
p. 110
). Sidney Lumet decided to give
Twelve Angry Men
a strict progression by shooting from different camera positions as the story developed. “As the picture unfolded I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller…. I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, the second third at eye level, and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end, the ceiling began to appear” (Sidney Lumet,
Making Movies
[New York: Knopf, 1995],
p. 81
). Our quotation from Nicole Kidman on the knife motif in
The Shining
comes from
Watching Movies: The Biggest Names in Cinema Talk About the Films That Matter Most
(New York: Henry Holt, 2003).
Maya Deren, the American experimentalist who made
Meshes of the Afternoon
(p. 000), was quite self-conscious about formal principles. She argued that a film should exploit the features that differentiate cinema from other arts—chiefly, its unique handling of space and time. Deren believed that a film’s organization emerges from the ways in which all the images subtly affect one another. “The elements, or parts, lose their original value and assume those conferred upon them by their function in this specific whole.” For more thoughts on this, see her 1946 essay “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film,” in
Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren,
ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, N.Y.: Documentext, 2005).
How does cinema evoke emotion? It’s actually a bit of a puzzle. If a giant ape were lumbering toward us on the street, we’d run away in fright. But if King Kong is lumbering toward us on the screen, we feel frightened, but we don’t flee the theater. Do we feel real fear but somehow block our impulse to run? Or do we feel something that isn’t real fear but is a kind of pretend-fear? Similarly, when we say that we
identify
with a character, what does that mean? That we feel exactly the same emotions that the character does? Sometimes, though, we feel some emotions that the character isn’t feeling, as when sympathy for her or him is mixed with pity or anxiety. Can we identify with a character and not have the same feelings she has?
In the 1990s, philosophers and film theorists tried to shed light on these issues. For a sampling, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds.,
Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The essays in this collection grew out of debates around some influential books: Noël Carroll,
The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart
(London: Routledge, 1990); Murray Smith,
Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Joseph Anderson,
The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory
(Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1996); and Torben Grodal,
Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Greg M. Smith,
Film Structure and the Emotion System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Most of these authors draw upon an approach called
cognitive studies.
We reflect on similar topics on our blog. In “Minding movies,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=2004
, we give a sketch of how cognitive studies can help understand how we perceive and understand films. For a related approach, see “Simplicity, clarity, balance: A tribute to Rudolf Arnheim,” at
www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=956
.
An alternative approach to understanding spectators’ response to films has been called
reception studies.
For an overview, see Janet Staiger,
Media Reception Studies
(New York: New York University Press, 2005). Often scholars working in this tradition seek to understand how specific social groups, such as ethnic groups or historically located audiences, respond to the films offered to them. Influential examples are Kate Brooks and Martin Barker’s
Judge Dredd: Its Friends, Fans, and Foes
(Luton: University of Luton Press, 2003) and Melvin Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds.,
American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era
(London: British Film Institute, 1999). In
Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), Janet Staiger discusses how audiences and critics can respond to films in ways that the filmmakers could not have anticipated.
Many critics concentrate on ascribing implicit and symptomatic meanings to films—that is, interpreting them. A survey of interpretive approaches is offered in R. Barton Palmer,
The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches
(New York: AMS Press, 1989). David Bordwell’s
Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) reviews trends in film interpretation.
When we’re analyzing a scripted fiction film, creating a segmentation often amounts to retracing the screenwriter’s creative steps. The writer typically builds a screenplay out of a list of scenes, sometimes noting each scene on a card and laying out the cards to assess how the plot is shaping up.
Because today’s feature films tend to have short scenes (typically running one to three minutes each), there may be 60 or more sequences in a film. Older films seldom contain more than 40, and silent films may have only 10 or 20. Of course, sequences and scenes can also be further subdivided into smaller parts. In segmenting any film, use an outline format or a linear diagram to help you visualize formal relations (beginnings and endings, parallels, patterns of development). We employ an outline format in discussing
Citizen Kane
in the next chapter and in discussing modes of filmmaking in
Chapter 10
.
www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/
A site devoted to the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, which examines various aspects of psychological and emotional responses to film.
Recommended DVD Supplementshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art
. A helpful introductory essay on the role of form in different art media.
The Warner Bros. two-disc special edition of
The Wizard of Oz
contains supplements documenting the film’s production. See also Aljean Harmetz,
The Making of the Wizard of Oz
(New York: Limelight, 1984), and John Fricke, Jay Scarfone, and William Stillman,
The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History
(New York: Warner Books, 1989).
While the film was in postproduction, MGM executives quarreled about whether the song “Over the Rainbow” should be dropped. Some thought it was too long and slowed the pace; others suggested that singing in a barnyard was undignified. Producer Arthur Freed argued passionately for retaining the ballad, and he won. His reasoning was expressed in an early memo, and its wording shows that he was conscious of the song’s role in motivating Dorothy’s journey:
The whole love story in
Snow White
is motivated by the song “Some Day My Prince Will Come” as Snow White is looking into the well. Dialogue could not have accomplished this half as well. I make this illustration for the purpose that we plant our
Wizard of Oz
script in a similar way through a musical sequence on the farm. Doing it musically takes all the triteness out of a straight plot scene. (Quoted in Fricke, Scarfone, and Stillman,
The Wizard of Oz,
p. 30
)
DVD supplements tend to focus on behind-the-scenes production information and on exposing how techniques such as special-effects and music were accomplished. Sometimes, though, such descriptions analyze formal aspects of the film. In “Sweet Sounds,” the supplement on the music in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
composer Danny Elfman discusses how the musical numbers that follow the disappearance of each of the obnoxious children created parallels among them and yet achieved variety by being derived from different styles of music.
“Their Production Will Be Second to None,” on the
Hard Day’s Night
DVD, includes an intelligent interview with director Richard Lester in which he talks about the overall form of the film. He remarks, for example, that in the first third, he deliberately used confined spaces and low ceilings to prepare for the extreme contrast of the open spaces into which the Beatles escape.
The “Production Design” supplement for
The Golden Compass
discusses motifs: circular elements in the sets and props associated with the heroine Lyra and the Oxford setting opposed to oval elements associated with the villainous Mrs. Coulter and the Magisterium.