In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), people,
places, and things look, sound, and move in ways
that are believable and even convincing, not
because they are true to our experiences but
because they conform to what common knowledge
tells us about how life might have been lived and
how things might have looked in the ancient world.
More to the point, Gladiatoradheres to the cine-
matic conventions established by previous movies
about the ancient world—dozens of them, ranging
from Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
(1925) to William Wyler’s remake of Ben-Hur(1959)
to Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus(1960)—and thus
satisfies our individual experiences with the sub-
ject matter of the film.
Cinematic Language
By cinematic language—a phrase that we have
already used a few times in this book—we mean the
accepted systems, methods, or conventions by
which the movies communicate with the viewer.
To fully understand cinema as a language, let’s
compare it with another, more familiar form of
language—the written one you’re engaged with this
instant. Our written language is based, for the pur-
pose of this explanation, on words. Each of those
words has a generally accepted meaning; but when
juxtaposed and combined with other words into a
sentence and presented in a certain context, each
can convey meaning that is potentially far more
subtle, precise, or evocative than that implied by its
standard “dictionary” definition.
Instead of arranging words into sentences, cine-
matic language combines and composes a variety of
elements—for example, lighting, movement, sound,
acting, and a number of camera effects—into single
shots. As you work your way through this book, you
will learn that most of these individual elements
carry conventional, generalized meanings. But
when combined with any number of other elements
and presented in a particular context, that ele-
ment’s standardized meaning grows more individu-
ated and complex. And the integrated arrangement
of all of a shot’s combined elements provides even
greater expressive potential. Thus, in cinema, as in
the written word, the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts. But the analogy doesn’t end there. Just
as authors arrange sentences into paragraphs and
chapters, filmmakers derive still more accumulated
meaning by organizing shots into a system of larger
components: sequences and scenes. Furthermore,
within sequences and scenes a filmmaker can jux-
tapose shots to create a more complex meaning
than is usually achieved in standard prose. As view-
ers, we analyze cinematic language and its particu-
lar resources of expression and meaning. If your
instructor refers to the textof a movie or asks you to
reada particular shot, scene, or movie, she is asking
you to apply your understanding of cinematic
language.
The conventions that make up cinematic lan-
guage are flexible, not rules; they imply a practice
that has evolved through film history, not an indis-
putable or “correct” way of doing things. In fact,
cinematic conventions represent a degree of agree-
ment between the filmmaker and the audience
about the mediating element between them: the
film itself. Although filmmakers frequently build
upon conventions with their own innovations, they
nonetheless understand and appreciate that these
conventions were themselves the result of innova-
tions. For example, a dissolve between two shots
usually indicates the passing of time but not the
extent of that duration, so in the hands of one film-
maker it might mean two minutes, and in the hands
of another, several years. Thus, you will begin to
understand and appreciate that the development of
cinematic language, and thus the cinema itself, is
founded on this tension between convention and
innovation.
In all of this, we identify with the camera lens.
The filmmaker (here in this introduction we use
that generic term instead of the specific terms
screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor, etc.,
that we shall use as we proceed) uses the camera as
a maker of meaning, just as the painter uses the
brush or the writer uses the pen: the angles, heights,
and movements of the camera function both as a
set of techniques and as expressive material, the
cinematic equivalent of brushstrokes or of nouns,
verbs, and adjectives. From years of looking at
movies, you are already aware of how cinematic60 CHAPTER 2 PRINCIPLES OF FILM FORM