Chapter 2

The Significance of Film Form

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Form as Pattern

• Artwork creates a structured experience.• Form can be created from patterns, which

construct an overall set of relationships among a film’s parts.

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“Form” vs. “Content”

• Form can be content.• How a viewer relates to the patterns

established by the filmmakers contributes to the content of the film.

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Formal Expectations

• By building expectation, form can deliver many reactions.

• Shock, surprise, satisfaction, and suspense all build upon the viewer’s assumptions.

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Conventions and Experience

• Conventions are based on the viewer’s prior experience.

• Artwork can create new expectations and conventions.

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Form and Feeling

• Emotions within the artwork and emotional responses from the viewer can interact.

• This relationship can be complicated and affected by personal experience.

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Form and Meaning

• Referential: meanings within a film that rely on familiarity with significant places or things.

• Explicit: meanings that are openly asserted.• Implicit: an implied or interpreted meaning.• Symptomatic: an abstract, general meaning

that depends on social ideology.

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Evaluation: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

• Criteria (realism, morality, coherence, intensity, complexity, and originality) should guide objective evaluation.

• Personal taste and “goodness” or “badness” do not enter into evaluation.

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Principles of Film Form

• A unified set of related, interdependent elements that create relationships between the parts.

• Many are a matter of convention.• Form follows function.

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Function

• Every element within a film can have one or more function, fulfilling role(s) within the whole system.

• Consider an element’s motivation when looking for significant functions.

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Similarity and Repetition

• A significant element that is repeated in a film is a motif.

• Patterns of motifs create expectation.• Strong similarities and repetition can create

parallelism.

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Difference and Variation

• Changes and variations of elements can create variety, contrast, and change.

• Seldom does repetition occur in exactly the same way in a film, and the differences can be meaningful.

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Development

• A progression moving from beginning to middle to end.

• A segmentation can point out similarities, differences, and progression.

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Unity and Disunity

• How relationships among elements come together or do not.

• Creates broad patterns and thematic meanings.

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