36 CHAPTER 2PRINCIPLES OF FILM FORM
as lighting, setting, props, costumes, and makeup
within individual shots. Sound, another elemental
system, is organized into a series of dialogue,
music, ambience, and effects tracks. Narrativeis
structured into acts that establish, develop, and
resolve character conflict. Editingjuxtaposes indi-
vidual shots(the product of one uninterrupted run
of the camera) to create sequences(a series of
shots unified by theme or purpose), arranges these
sequences into scenes(complete units of plot
action), and from these scenes builds a movie. The
synthesis of all of these elemental systems (and
others not mentioned above) constitutes the over-
all form that the movie takes. We’ll spend some
time with each of these elemental formal systems
in later chapters, but first let’s take a closer look at
the concept of form itself, beginning with the corre-
lation between form and the content it shapes and
communicates.Form and Content
The terms formand contentcrop up in almost any
scholarly discussion of the arts, but what do they
mean, and why are they so often paired? To start
with, we can define contentas the subject of an
artwork (what the work is about), and form as
the means by which that subject is expressed and
experienced. The two terms are often paired
because works of art need them both. Content pro-
vides something to express; form supplies the
methods and techniques necessary to present it to
the audience.
And form doesn’t just allow us to see the
subject/content; it lets us see that content in a par-
ticular way.Form enables the artist to shape our
particular experience and interpretationof that
content. In the world of movies, form is cinematic
language:the tools and techniques that filmmak-
ers use to convey meaning and mood to the viewer,
including lighting, mise-en-scène, cinematography,
performance, editing, and sound... in other words,
the content of most of this textbook.
If we consider the Junoscene analyzed in Chap-
ter 1, the content is: Juno in the waiting room.We
could be more specific and say that the content isFilm Form
Chapter 1’s analyses of scenes from Juno and the
Harry Pottermovies provided us with a small taste
of how the various elements of movies work. We
saw how the filmmakers coordinated performance,
composition, sound, and editing to create meaning
and tell a story. All of these elements were carefully
chosen and controlled by the filmmakers to pro-
duce each movie’s form.
If we’ve learned nothing else so far, we can at
least now say with confidence that very little in any
movie is left to chance. Each of the multiple sys-
tems that together become the “complex synthe-
sis” that we know as a movie is highly organized
and deliberately assembled and sculpted by film-
makers. For example, mise-en-scène, one elemen-
tal system of film, composes design elements such
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be
able to
✔differentiate between form and content in
a movie and be able to explain how they’re
related.
✔appreciate how expectations shape our
experience and interpretation of film
form.
✔begin to recognize some of the ways
movies exploit patterns to create structure
and convey meaning.
✔understand how movies depend on light
and how lighting helps shape a movie’s
meaning.
✔explain how movies provide an illusion of
movement.
✔understand how movies manipulate space
and time.
✔distinguish between realism and antireal-
ism, and explain how achieving verisimili-
tude is important to them both.
✔explain what is meant by cinematic
language.