The+significance+of+film+form

**The Significance of Film Form Overview**



Narrative as a Formal System:

Because stories are all around us, spectators approach a narrative film with definite expectations—knowing much about the story the film will tell and about anticipations characteristic of narrative form like characters and action, a series of connected incidents, problems or conflicts either resolved or have a new light cast on them.


 * 1) Plot (diegetic) and story (+nondiegetic): a narrative is a chain of events in cause-effect relationships occurring in time and space—a story with causality, time and space.
 * 2) Narration: The Flow of Story Information
 * 3) Narrative Conventions: Genres like Westerns, samurai films, spy films, melodramas, and comedies. Classical Hollywood cinema, however, governs narrative films here and abroad.
 * 4) The action will spring primarily from individual characters as causal agents.
 * 5) Desire is a trait to get narrative moving—the character wants something.
 * 6) A counterforce, an opposition that creates conflict—makes it more difficult to achieve goal(s).
 * 7) Characters and their traits, particularly desire, are a strong source of causes and effects.
 * 8) The chain of events that results from predominately psychological causes tends to motivate most or all other narrative events. Time is subordinated to the cause-effect chain.
 * 9) Classic narration exploits a variety of oppositions, but there is a strong tendency for it to be “objective” –that is, there is a basically “objective” story reality, against which various degrees of perceptual or mental subjectivity can be measured. Narration tends to be unrestricted, too.
 * 10) Most classical narrative films display strong degrees of closure at the end.


 * Mise-en-Scene=the fact of putting into the scene—director's control over what appears in the film frame: setting, lighting, costume, and the behavior of the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the director stages the events for the camera. **


 * 1) Setting (and props)
 * 2) Costume and Make-up
 * 3) Lighting
 * 4) quality refers to the relative intensity of the illumination. “Hard” lighting creates clearly defined shadows, whereas “soft” lighting creates a diffused illumination.
 * 5) Direction of lighting in a shot refers to the path of light from its source to the object(s) lit. Frontal lighting, sidelighting, backlighting, underlighting, and top lighting.
 * 6) Sources: Classical Hollywood filmmaking developed the custom of using at least three light sources per shot: key light, fill light, and backlight.
 * 7) Filmmakers can make the illumination of a scene any color at all.


 * 1) Figure Expression and Movement:


 * The Shot: Cinematographic Properties: The photographic qualities of the shot, the framing of the shot, and the duration of the shot **

A. The Photographic Image: cinematography (writing in movement) depends to a large extent on photography (writing in light). The filmmaker can select the range of tonalities, manipulate the speed of motion, and transform perspective.

Shoot, edit, project


 * Framing: **


 * Now the updated Academy ration is 1:1.85. **


 * Onscreen and Offscreen Space: **

Whatever its shape, the frame makes the image finite—the film image is bounded, limited—the frame selects a slice of an implicitly continuous world to show us. Characters enter the image from somewhere and go off to someplace else—offscreen space. Noel Burch has pointed out six zones of offscreen space 1. the space beyond each of the four edges of the frame 2. the space behind the set 3. the space behind the camera


 * Angle, Level, Height, and Distance of Framing **

These terms refer to what we see on the screen and need not always conform to what occurred during production.

1. Angle: The frame implies an angle of vision with respect to what is shown. It thus positions us at some angle onto the shot’s mise-en-scene. In practice three are distinguished: the straight-on angle, the high angle (looking down), and the low angle (looking up).

2. Level: We can distinguish the degree to which the framing is “level.” If level, the horizontal edges of the frame will be parallel to the horizon of the shot and perpendicular to the poles. If horizon and poles in a frame are at diagonal angles, the frame is **canted** in one manner or another.

3. Height: Sometimes it becomes important to specify the sense that the framing gives us of being stationed at a certain height. Camera height is not simply a matter of camera angle. Some filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu position the camera close to the ground to film characters or objects on the floor.

4. Distance: The framing of the image stations us not only at certain angle and height on a level plane or a cant, but also with respect to distance. Framing supplies a sense of being far away from or close to the mise-en-scene of the shot—usually called camera distance: a. The extreme long shot—the human figure is barely visible. For landscapes, bird’s=eye views of cities, and other extensive entities. b. Long shot—figures are more prominent, but the background still dominates. c. American shot (plan americain) –the human figure is framed from the knees up. d. medium long shots—shots at the same distance of nonhuman subjects. e. medium shot—frames the human body from the waist up. f. medium close-up—frames the body from the chest up. g. close-up—traditionally the shot showing just the head, hands, feet or a small object. h. extreme close-up—singles out a portion of the face (eyes or lips), isolates a detail, magnifies the minute.


 * The Mobile Frame: ** Within the confines of the image we see, the framing of the object changes. Since the framing orients us to the material in the image, we often see ourselves as moving along with the frame. Through such framing we may approach the object or retreat from it, circle it or move past it. The mobile frame may thus produce changes of camera height, distance, angle, and level within the shot.

1. pan movement rotates the camera on a vertical axis (panorama) Onscreen the pan gives the impression of a frame horizontally scanning space, as if the camera turns its head. 2. tilt movement rotates the camera on a horizontal axis. It is as if the camera’s head were swiveling up or down—unrolling a space from top to bottom or bottom to top. 3. in the tracking (or dolly or trucking) shot shows the camera as a whole changes position—travels in any direction along the ground (forward, back, circularly, diagonally, or from side to side. 4. in the crane shot the camera leaves the ground and can travel not only forward and backward, in and out, but also up and down. Variations are helicopter and airplane shots, which allow the camera to travel great distances above the ground.

It offers an alternative to building the sequence out of many shots, stresses the cut that finally comes, moves constantly. The shot has its own internal pattern of development. The shot guides our response by taking us through a suspenseful process of narrative development. The long take’s ability to present, in a single chunk of time, a complex pattern of events moving toward a goal makes shot duration as important to the image’s effect as are photographic qualities and framing.
 * Duration of the Image: The Long Take—Classic Example is Welles’s //Touch of Evil.// **


 * The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing **

Editing is the coordination of one shot with the next. Distinguish how editing is done in production and how edition appears on the screen to viewers. In film production a shot is one or more frames in series on a continuous length of film stock. The film editor joins shots, the end one to the beginning of another.

The junction may be made in several ways:
 * 1) a fade-out may gradually darken the end of shot A to black
 * 2) and a fade-in may accordingly lighten shot B from black.
 * 3) A dissolve may briefly superimpose the end of shot A and the beginning of shot B.
 * 4) In a wipe, one image replaces another as a moving boundary line crosses the screen.
 * 5) The most common means of joining two shots, however, is the cut, which in film production is usually made by splicing two shots together by means of cement or tape. In such cases the physical junction from shot to shot is accomplished in the act of filmmaking. –cutting after shooting is the norm. Cuts are perceived as instantaneous changes from one shot to another.

Continuity Editing: plan the cinematography and mise-en-scene with a view to editing the shots according to a specific system—to tell a story coherently and clearly, to map out the chain of characters’ actions in an undistracting way. Editing, supported by specific strategies of cinematography and mise-en-scene, was used to ensure narrative continuity. The basic purpose of continuity system is to control the potentially disunifying force of editing by establishing a smooth flow from shot to shot.


 * Sound in Cinema: Diegetic (in film space) and Nondiegetic (outside film space) **


 * Summary: **

Film Form

Narrative System<interacts with - à Stylistic system

Nonnarrative Narrative Patterned and significant use of techniques:

Categorical plot Mise-en-scene: setting, costume and make-up, Lighting, and figure expression and motion Rhetorical cause/effect Cinematography: mobility (pan, tilt, track, crane) or Distance (els, ls, mls, ms, mcu, cu, ecu) or duration or  Angle or level or height.

Abstract time Editing Associational space Sound Patterns of development Narrative conventions Characters as causal agents Characters’ desire gets narrative moving A counterforce/opposition creates conflict Cause and effects from chars’ desires Time subordinate to cuase and effect Closure