Juno thinking about fingernails and changing her
mind.The form used to express that subject and
meaning includes decor, patterns, implied proxim-
ity, point of view, moving camera, and sound.
The relationship between form and content is
central not just to our study of movies; it is an
underlying concern in all art. An understanding of
the two intersecting concepts can help us to distin-
guish one work of art from another or to compare
the styles and visions of different artists approach-
ing the same subject.
If we look at three sculptures of a male figure,
for example—by Praxiteles, Alberto Giacometti,
and Keith Haring, artists spanning history from
ancient Greece to the present—we can see crucial
differences in vision, style, and meaning (see the
illustrations on page 38). Each sculpture can be
said to express the same subject, the male body, but
they clearly differ in form. Of the three, Praxiteles’s
sculpture, Hermes Carrying the Infant Dionysus,
comes closest to resembling a flesh-and-blood
body. Giacometti’s Walking Man(1960) elongates
and exaggerates anatomical features, but the figure
remains recognizable as a male human. Haring’s
Self Portrait(1989) smooths out and simplifies the
contours of the human body to create an even more
abstract rendering.
Once we recognize the formal differences and
similarities among these three sculptures, we can
ask questions about how the respective forms
shape our emotional and intellectual responses to
the subject matter. Look again at the ancient Greek
sculpture. Although there might once have been a
living man whose body looked like this, very few
bodies do. The sculpture is an idealization—less a
matter of recording the way a particular man actu-
ally looked than of visually describing an ideal male
form. As such, it is as much an interpretation of the
FORM AND CONTENT 37Form and contentThe contentof the Junowaiting room
scene analyzed in Chapter 1 is: Juno thinking about
fingernails and changing her mind. As we saw in that
analysis, a great deal of formwas employed to shape our
experience and interpretation of that content, including
sound, juxtaposition, pattern, point of view, and the relative
size of the subject in each frame.