Film

Film, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of
light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives
the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement.

A popular form of mass media, film is a remarkably effective medium for conveying drama and
evoking emotion. The art of motion pictures is exceedingly complex, requiring contributions
from nearly all the other arts as well as countless technical skills (for example, in sound
recording, photography, and optics). Emerging at the end of the 19th century, this new art form
became one of the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond. See
also "the history of film."

As a commercial venture, offering fictional narratives to large audiences in theatres, film was
quickly recognized as perhaps the first truly mass form of entertainment. Without losing its
broad appeal, the medium also developed as a means of artistic expression in such areas
as acting, directing, screenwriting, cinematography, costume and set design, and music.

Essential characteristics of film

In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed
fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in styles that
differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the documentary created
by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic involving hundreds of
performers and technicians.

A number of factors immediately come to mind in connection with the film experience. For one
thing, there is something mildly hypnotic about the illusion of movement that holds the attention
and may even lower critical resistance. The accuracy of the film image is compelling because it
is made by a nonhuman, scientific process. In addition, the motion picture gives what has been
called a strong sense of being present; the film image always appears to be in the present tense.
There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and things.

No less important than any of the above are the conditions under which the motion picture
ideally is seen, where everything helps to dominate the spectators. They are taken from their
everyday environment, partially isolated from others, and comfortably seated in a dark
auditorium. The darkness concentrates their attention and prevents comparison of the image on
the screen with surrounding objects or people. For a while, spectators live in the world the
motion picture unfolds before them.

Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience react as
if the events on the screen are real—for instance, by ducking before an onrushing locomotive in
a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a relatively low
form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be truer to certain
unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes expect
exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from the
real world and make them exercise their imagination, a demand made by great works of art in all
forms.

Francis Ford Coppola: The GodfatherSalvatore Corsitto (left) and Marlon Brando in The
Godfather (1972), a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.(more)

The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are implicitly
accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish lighting,
filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life in the
early 20th century (as in The Godfather [1972] and Days of Heaven [1978]). The brownish tinge
that is associated with such films is a visual code intended to evoke a viewer’s perceptions of an
earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are even
more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality.
Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic
moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), for example, begins in a
torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts.
In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission
pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore,
the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film
signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a walled-
up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film’s grainy photography
plays on the spectator’s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images with newsreels.

Fidelity in the reproduction of details is much less important than the appeal made by the story to
an emotional response, an appeal based on innate characteristics of the motion-picture medium.
These essential characteristics can be divided into those that pertain primarily to the motion-
picture image, those that pertain to motion pictures as a unique medium for works of art, and
those that derive from the experience of viewing motion pictures.
Qualities of the film image

The primary unit of expression in film is the image, or the single shot.
The attribution of magical properties to images has a long history. This association is well
documented among many primitive peoples, and it is even reflected in the term magic lantern as
a synonym for the film projector. Any image taken out of the everyday world and projected onto
a screen to some extent appears to become magically transmuted. This magical quality helps to
explain the enthusiastic reception accorded such early films as La Sortie des usines
Lumière (1895; “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), which were merely photographic
records of commonplace scenes in France in the 1890s by the French film pioneers the Lumière
brothers.

Intensity, intimacy, ubiquity

The qualities of intensity, intimacy, and ubiquity have been singled out as
the salient characteristics of the motion-picture image. Its intensity derives from its power to
hold the complete attention of the spectator on whatever bit of reality is being shown. Outside
the theatre, a person’s attention is usually dispersed in the endless surrounding reality, except for
sporadic moments of concentration on what is selected for closer scrutiny. In the cinema one is
compelled to look at something that not the viewer but the filmmaker has selected, for reasons
that are not always immediately apparent. This quality of intensity becomes most noticeable
when the camera remains fixed on something for a longer time than seems warranted, and
spectators gradually become acutely conscious of their loss of volition over their own attention.
This technique is not often used but is very effective when used well.

The intimacy of the film image is related to the camera’s ability to see things in greater detail
than the eye can. This ability is demonstrated in long-distance shots through a telephoto lens as
well as in close-ups. At the beginning of the Japanese film Suna no onna (1964; Woman in the
Dunes), for example, a pervading theme of the film is indicated by shots of grains of sand many
times enlarged.

The impression of ubiquity—being everywhere at once—is achieved in part by the camera’s

apparent freedom to move from place to place or to approach or withdraw instantaneously. No
less important to this illusion of ubiquity is the effect achieved by editing, which allows
countless images representing a long, elaborate action to be presented in a comparatively short
film or sequence, such as that exemplified by the opening of The Battle of Algiers. The
geographic and temporal authority of the image even permits credibility to be given to sequences
representing the past, the future, and dreams.

Particularity

Other equally important characteristics of the film image may be singled out. One of these is its
particularity. The language of words lends itself to generalization and abstraction. In themselves,
words such as man or house do not suggest a particular man or a particular house but men and
houses in general, and more abstract terms such as love or dishonesty have even less-precise
associations with specific things. Motion pictures, on the other hand, show only particular things
—a particular man or a particular house. In this way a film image may be less ambiguous than
the language of words but also less evocative, less likely to be enriched by imagination,
association, or recollection. Despite its particularity, however, the motion-picture image may
also be ambiguous in that it shows but does not explain. It does not in itself tell what it means,
and people instinctively search for meanings in images. This is why commentary is thought to be
essential in tying down precise meaning in educational films. On the other hand, many evocative
documentaries, from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) to Errol Morris’s Fast,
Cheap & Out of Control (1997), abjure commentary, thus forcing the spectator to take in the
remarkable and untranslatable specific sights and sounds they collect. The particular insistence
of given photographed objects also explains why the juxtapositions of montage are so effective
—the spectator compulsively searches for the reason behind a particular sequence of images.

Neutrality

Another characteristic of the film image is its neutrality. The world people see around them is
strongly influenced by their emotions and their interests. A plumber fixing pipes in a museum
may not see the masterpieces around him or her, while an angry person may hear an insult where
none was intended. The camera and the microphone, however, are thought to reproduce images
and sounds without feeling. Although focus, directionality, and other technological factors limit
what can be seen and heard, audiences are prepared to believe that the motion picture itself is
nonhuman or even superhuman in its passive reception of information. Courts of law, for
example, are more likely to accept film as evidence of an occurrence such as a bank robbery than
they are to accept an artist’s sketch or a journalist’s report of the same incident. When a film
appears to be charged with emotion, it is usually because the director has carefully manipulated
the images to give this illusion. In everyday life, the eyes follow the mind; in the cinema, the
mind follows the eyes.

Characteristics of the medium

Four characteristics may be stressed as factors that differentiate the motion-picture medium,
either in degree or in kind, from other mediums for works of art: luminosity, movement, realism,
and montage.

Luminosity

The intense brightness of the picture projected by powerful light onto a coated screen in itself
transforms the most mundane element of reality. The appeal of a luminous picture is attested by
efforts of advertisers to achieve luminous effects in posters and displays. The luminosity of the
motion-picture image also results in a considerable range of tone, between the brightest highlight
and the deepest black. In both black-and-white and colour films, the most delicate gradations in
the image are therefore possible.

Movement

As a feature of the motion picture, movement is so obvious that its central importance is
sometimes forgotten. The motion picture has much in common with the graphic arts, but the
added dimension of movement transforms it, allowing a narrative or a drama to unfold in time in
a way no other graphic art can. Both in filmmaking and in film appreciation, movement must
constantly be borne in mind: composition in the motion picture is kinetic rather than static. It is
not a single colour but the cumulative effect that matters, not a single situation but a developing
plot. The composition within any frame, or exposure, of a motion picture is as important as the
relationship of that frame to those that precede and follow it.

Realism

Another essential element of the motion-picture image is that it gives an impression of reality.
Whether in a drama enacted expressly for the camera or in a documentary film of an event at
which the camera just happened to be present, this feeling of realism deriving from motion-
picture photography accounts for much of the force of motion pictures. Animated films, which
lack this element of photographic realism, tend to be taken as fantasies.

The attempt of the motion picture to reproduce three-dimensional reality on a flat screen presents
the same problems and opportunities that are encountered in still photography and in painting.
The standard camera lens, in fact, is constructed to produce visual effects precisely similar to
those achieved by painters using the principles of perspective that were developed during
the Renaissance.

Cinematic realism is most fully heightened when the images are accompanied by
synchronous sound, whereby a second sense, hearing, ratifies what the eyes see. Although
reproduced sound can be manipulated with regard to distance, timbre, clarity, and duration, in
combination with photographed moving images, it forcefully brings alive its subject as present in
a way unavailable to the other arts of representation.

Montage

Perhaps the most essential characteristic of the motion picture is montage, from the
French monter, “to assemble.” Montage refers to the editing of the film, the cutting and piecing
together of exposed film in a manner that best conveys the intent of the work. Montage is what
distinguishes motion pictures from the performing arts, which exist only within a performance.
The motion picture, by contrast, uses the performances as the raw material, which is built up as a
novel or an essay or a painting, studiously put together piece by piece, with an allowance for trial
and error, second thoughts, and, if necessary, reshooting. The order in which the segments of
film are presented can have drastically different dramatic effects.

Several major contributions to the theory of montage were made by Soviet directors. After
the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet films were encouraged for their propaganda value, but
film stocks were scarce. Soviet directors carefully studied the films of D.W. Griffith and other
masters to make the most effective use of their own meagre resources. One of those early
Russian directors, Lev Kuleshov, conducted an experiment involving identical shots of an actor’s
expressionless face. He inserted it in a film before a shot of a bowl of soup, again before a shot
of a child playing, and still again before one of a dead old woman. An unsuspecting audience,
asked to evaluate the actor’s performance, praised his ability to express, respectively, hunger,
tenderness, and grief.

Sergei Eisenstein, who excelled both as a director and as a teacher, based much of his theory of
film on montage, which he compared to the compounding of characters in Japanese writing. The
character for “dog” added to the character for “mouth,” he noted, results not merely in “dog’s
mouth” but in the new concept of “bark”; similarly, film montage results in more than the sum of
its parts. Still another great Russian director, Vsevolod Pudovkin, also stressed the importance of
the carryover in the spectator’s mind. Only if an object is presented as part of a synthesis, he
said, is it endowed with filmic life.

Three types of montage may be distinguished—narrative, graphic, and ideational.

In narrative montage the multifarious images and scenes involve a single subject followed from
point to point. In a fiction film, a character or location is explored from multiple angles while the
audience builds a comprehensive image of the situation being explored or explained. Graphic
montage occurs when shots are juxtaposed not on the basis of their subject matter but because of
their physical appearance. Some avant-garde works depend on the spectator’s ability to match
the graphic relations of assorted images, such as the people, the objects, and the shapes of
numerical and alphabetical figures in Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique (1924) or the
torpedoes, swimming seals, and blimps in Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958).

In graphic montage, cutting usually occurs during shots of movement rather than ones of static
action. This cutting on motion facilitates the smooth replacement of one image by the next.

In ideational montage, two separate images are related to a third thing, an idea that they help to
produce and by which they are governed. In Stachka (1924; Strike), for example, the director
Eisenstein, to whom the theory of ideational montage is credited, effectively conveys the idea of
slaughter by intercutting a shot of cattle being butchered with shots of workers being cut down
by cavalry.

These three types of montage seldom appear in their pure form. Most ideational montage
proceeds on the basis of the graphic similarity of its components, as does narrative montage
when relying on graphic cutting to cover its movement. Similarly, the graphic matches between
torpedoes, seals, and blimps in A Movie ultimately construct an idea of movement toward
explosion and destruction. Besides the complications brought about by the intermixing of these
types, the addition of the sound track multiplies the possibilities and effects of montage.
Eisenstein and Pudovkin referred to such possibilities as “vertical” montage, opposing it to the
“horizontal” unrolling of shot after shot. Because sound permits the establishment of relations
between what is seen and heard at each moment, the film image can no longer be said to be a
self-contained unit; it interacts with the sound that accompanies it. Sound relations
(including dialogue, music, and ambient noise or effects) may be built in constant rapport with
the image track or may create a parallel organization and design that subtends what is seen. In
all, montage appears to be the most extraordinary factor differentiating the motion picture from
the other arts, and it is the one often singled out as the basis of the medium. Nevertheless, many
films, including those of Mizoguchi Kenji of Japan, Roberto Rossellini of Italy, and Jancsó
Miklós of Hungary, rely not on montage but on the medium’s unique qualities of luminosity,
movement, and realism to convey their power and beauty.