somehow about defining an ideal; Giacometti’s
seems to reach for something that lies beneath the
surface of human life and the human form; and
Haring’s appears to celebrate the body as a source
of joy. As we become more attentive to their formal
differences, these sculptures become more unlike
each other in their content, too.
Thus, form and content—rather than being sep-
arate things that come together to produce art—
are instead two aspects of the entire formal system
of a work of art. They are interrelated, interde-
pendent, and interactive. Sometimes, of course, we
might have good reasons, conceptually and criti-
cally, to isolate the content of a film from its form.
It might be useful to do so when, say, comparing the
rendition in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down(2001;
screenwriter: Ken Nolan) of the 1993 U.S. military
intervention in Somalia with a historical account of
the same event. In such an analysis, issues of com-
pleteness, accuracy, and reliability would take precedence over formal qualities of the film, such
as cinematography and editing. By focusing solely
on content, however, we risk overlooking the
aspects that make movies unique as an art form
and interesting as individual works of art.
Form and Expectations
As we discussed in Chapter 1, our decision to see a
particular movie is almost always based on certain
expectations. Perhaps we have enjoyed previous
work by the director, the screenwriter, or the
actors; or publicity, advertisements, friends, or
reviews have attracted us; or the genre is appeal-
ing; or we’re curious about the techniques used to
make the movie.
Even if we have no such preconceptions before
stepping into a movie theater, we will form impres-
sions very quickly once the movie begins, some-
times even from the moment the opening credits
roll. (In Hollywood, producers and screenwriters
assume that audiences decide whether they like or
dislike a movie within its first ten minutes.) As the
movie continues, we experience a more complex
web of expectations, many of which may be tied to
the narrative—the formal arrangement of the
events that make up the story—and, specifically, toFocusing on contentOn October 3, 1993, nearly a
hundred U.S. Army Rangers parachuted into Mogadishu, the
capital of Somalia, to capture two men. Their mission was
supposed to take about an hour, but they ended up in a
fifteen-hour battle, the longest sustained ground attack
involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War. Two U.S.
Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed; eighteen Americans
and hundreds of Somalis were killed; military and civilian
casualties numbered in the thousands. Whereas its source,
Mark Bowden’s best-selling nonfiction book of the same title,
was a minute-by-minute account of the firefight, Ridley
Scott’s narrative film Black Hawk Down(2001) re-creates
events by dramatically condensing the action into 144 min-
utes. Clearly, the book and the movie differ in their form, and
we might have interesting discussions about their differ-
ences. But for many viewers, the primary concern is the con-
tentof both book and movie. What relationship does each
work bear to the facts? What would it mean, in this case, to
say that the movie is better than the book or vice versa?
DVDThis tutorial reviews the key concepts
of form and content and illustrates their
importance with additional examples.FORM AND EXPECTATIONS 39