Film Theory
Introduction
Film theory is defined as a collection of interpretative
frameworks that are developed over time to better understand how films are made
and received (sparknotes.com, 2011).
Film theorists suggest that films have its own language due to how they
convey meaning -- in a sense, a film has its own language and how it
communicates that language to the audience is dependent on many factors.
Eisenstien and
Pudovkin
Eisenstein and Pudovkin maintains that montage is the key to
transform and effectively convey a film's meaning. Eisenstien's form of montage
can be considered as a form of 'art collision' -- a conflict between two
succeeding shots that has potential in pure visual terms. The shots produce
conflict in various ways in terms of emotional impact, rhythm, or direction, to
name a few. He also sees this collision as an imaged form of "an
expression of Marxist dialetical principle" -- a clash of opposing forces.
The meaning of a film is thus created through these dialetical interplay of shots.
Pudovkin, on the other hand, view montage as building blocks;
adding one element onto another, which does not necessarily comprise of
theoretical images. As a result, it provides a more realistic narrative with a
calmer pace, which is the trademark of many of Pudovkin's films.
Andre Bazin
Andre Bazin believes that a film should reveal reality as a
whole and not presented in bits and pieces. He also firmly believes that
synchronous speech is necessary for proper development of a film as opposed to
Eisenstein's view that synchronous dialogue does not work well with proper use
of montage. For Bazin, dialogue helps bring a film back to its rightful path
that montage and silence divert from. He endorses the usage of mise-en-scene to
create depth in a film, although this may not work as well for all silent
films. Mise-en-scene focuses on the content of the images instead of how they
are ordered. As a result, the meaning of the film is derived from visual images
themselves and not from their juxtaposition.
Bazin rejects montage theorists' emphasis on the analogy
between words and shots, as well as their reluctance to employ sound as a
source of meaning for a film. He maintains that mise-en-scene is a fulfillment
and not a violation of film. He also believes that "analytical"
editing -- a dramatic technique of shot and reverse shot -- is an important
innovation in expanding a film's meaning. More importantly is the development
of depth of field shot pioneered by Orson Welles and William Wyler in the early
1940s, effectively rendering even analytical editing useless.
Bazin maintains that the shot-in-depth is also as crucial as
synchronous sound in the evolution of the language of film. It allows for
greater realism, and encourages the viewers to actively interact mentally
towards the film, in a sense that they can more fully explore the
interpretative and moral ambiguity of the film.
Brian Henderson
Brian Henderson, on the other hand, calls for a
"composition-in-depth" that is vastly different from the one Bazin
maintains, which was developed by Jean-Luc Godard. As opposed to the kind that
Bazin encourages, Godard's long and slow-tracking shots deliberately avoids
depth. Cinema is essentially a two-dimensional art that creates a
three-dimensional illusion through its "walk-around" capability. Both
montage and composition-in-depth can reach that three-dimension effect, albeit
in different ways where montage focuses on shots while composition-in-depth
focuses more on the movement of the camera and the mise-en-scene. As opposed to Bazin's observations of other
long takes, where the camera focuses on a scene that allows for rich
interpretative possibilities, Godard's slow-tracking shots avoids and excludes
any impression of depth, and this resembles that of a single-point perspective
in a painting.
Henderson infers that these are due to ideological reasons.
Composition-in-depth typically produces a deep, rich and complex impression of
a "bourgeois" world. Godard's reversion to only one plane demystifies
the world and its "pretenses", his style focusing more on the
critical point of view that he insists on his viewers. As a result, viewers are
visually and ideologically subjected to with a single image of this bourgeois
world; not to be simply accepted and easily understood, but to be critically
analyzed, examined and -- perhaps in the hopes of Godard -- rejected.
Christian Metz
It is only due to the rise of structuralism and semiotics
that writers like Christian Metz and Umberto Eco subjected the language of film
to more accurate analysis. Metz attempts to discuss the language of the film
through a scientific view by bringing in the usage of semiotics, which was
introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure.
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