Film Language - A Summary

Summary of the article "Film Language", from "Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings" edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen

The language of the film can be considered as a "visual esperanto"; it communicates and suggest meanings, and film theorists believe that it has its own grammar, vocabulary and even jargon. Its language is more than just a sequence of pictures strung together.

Montage

Eisenstein and Pudovkin, for instance, believed that montage is the key in "transforming" the language of the film. They believed that montage is pioneered by American director D.W. Griffith, whom they regarded as a major contributor to the "development of a cinematic language".

For Eisenstein, montage is a form of collision or conflict between two succeeding shots. Each shot, according to Eisenstein, has a potential visual energy; these shots can produce conflicts in various ways in terms of emotional impact, rhythms, direction, and others. He also views this conflict as an expression of a "Marxist dialectical principle" in terms of images, whereby cinematic meaning is created through an opposing "interplay" of shots. 

Pudovkin on the other hand sees montage as a "building" of images; by adding one thing to another, it creates a more realistic narrative with a calmer pace, as opposed to Eisenstein's trademark style of violent and tense rhythms. 

In terms of the use of sound and dialogue, Eisenstein believes that while synchronous sound and dialogue can be used with more precision in sound films, the usage of dialogue is incompatible with the proper usage of montage. 

Mis-en-scene

Andre Bazin on the other hand, while agreeing that montage and dialogue are incompatible, believes that the use of dialogue is "a necessary and proper development". He suggests that dialogue brings film back to the right track where montage and silence previously diverts from. To him, film image should reveal reality as a whole and not cut into bits. The method he endorses combine camera composition with staging action before it, or better known as the mis-en-scene. 

For Bazin, montage theorists did not speak for all silent film; films by those such as Erich von Stroheim, F.W Murnau and Robert Flaherty employ an alternative mis-en-scene tradition that focuses on the content and not the ordering of the images. As a result the film's effect and meaning is not gleaned from the juxtaposition of images, but inherent from the visual images themselves. For Bazin, the analogy between word and shot employed by montage theorists is false, and he rejects this along with the reluctance to employ sound as a "source of cinematic meaning". According to him, the mis-en-scene tradition actually looked to the use of synchronous sound as a "fulfillment" and not a "violation" of film. 

Composition-in-depth

While Bazin believes that "analytical" editing (involving the usage of dramatic technique of shot/reverse shot), was an important innovation particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, what is even more important is the development of the depth of field shot, employed by Orson Welles and William Wyler in the 1940s (and anticipated in the 1930s by Jean Renoir), rendering this "analytic" montage useless. He maintains that the shot-in-depth, like synchronous sound, is an essential advance toward cinema and its evolution as a language. It produces a more realistic narrative and encourages the audience to adapt a more active mental attitude, as they can now more fully explore the "interpretative and moral ambiguity" of the film. 

Brian Henderson calls for a different kind of "composition-in-depth", the kind that is developed in the works of Jean-Luc Goddard. In contrast to what Bazin would have viewed it as a way for composition to develop depth, Goddard's long and slow-tracking shots actively avoids it. Cinema is a two-dimensional art that creates the impression of a third dimension through its "walk-around" capability. Both montage and composition-in-depth are techniques that reach for this "third dimension" in different ways; montage through its succession of shots from different angles and ranges, and composition-in-depth through the movement of the camera and actors. Henderson's analysis of Goddard's films call for a different kind of long take different from that of Bazin's; Goddard's slow tracking shots actively avoids and even excludes any implication of depth in his shots, and forces the audience to view the scene as is, like a single-point perspective painting. 

Henderson theorizes that Goddard's reason for this is more ideological than anything else. The composition-in-depth in general produces a deep, rich and complex interpretation of the "bourgeois" world; Goddard's reversion of the scene onto a single plane demystifies the world and its pretenses. His style is more focused on the critical point of view that he insists on the audience. Viewers are subjected visually and ideologically, then, to the single picture of the "bourgeois" world, not for it to be simply accepted but to be critically examined and (Goddard might have concluded) rejected.