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Part I
Film language and aesthetics
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CHAPTER 1
Renaissance of (digital) film
FROM FILM PRINTS TO FILM FILES
Filmmaking today thrives as an independent, personal and industrial form of creative expression within today’s global digital, web-based and television environment. Until recently, the use of 35 mm film stock has been utilised in over 95 per cent of productions destined for the cinema theatres. Currently, with the advancement of digital projection systems, the prohibitive cost of 35 mm film stock, and the resolution capabilities of evolving camera and lens systems, ‘film-image’ digital capture practices have transcended the silver halide emulsion process. In 2012, the UK distributed over 80 per cent of its movie productions digitally. Within the next few years, distribution companies will not be making available any film prints and all cinemas will have completed the transition to full digital projection. The great cinematic camera companies, such as Panasonic, are no longer developing 35 mm technologies and are now focused on advancing high-definition digital image capture and lens quality to suit. What we are witnessing in cinema today is the grandest technological shift since the advent of the voice and soundtrack that transformed spectator experience. This contemporary transference is more than this new technology’s software and hardware upgrade; it stimulates convergence and diversity for filmmakers and audiences while contributing to social development and practices. It can be readily argued that with the range of digital equipment at our disposal, from student to Hollywood studio, the aesthetic concepts of how film stock captured its image, mise en scène, light and character has been transferred to its digital counterpart. Thus, the term ‘digital film’ is an applicable notion and moniker, for today, that represents the amalgamation of traditional cinematic concepts (as originally achieved on celluloid) with today’s digital formats and practises, including 3D holographic and IMAX systems.
Conversely, however, in today’s ‘digital film’ world, independent, transgressive (and some studio – Oliver Stone’s JFK, 1991) filmmakers employ a widening range of retro camera formats to capture their imagery. These include 16 mm, Super 16 mm, Standard 8 mm, Super 8 mm, Fisher-Price, VHS, and Hi8 formats in conjunction with current mobile phone and computer technologies to create and experiment with image, narrative, and structure. In fact, today, many filmmakers utilise cross-platform formats (digital and film), including varied ratio aspects, to affect particular creative and aesthetic outcomes. For example, Kodak has recently re-released both Standard 8 and Super 8 mm film formats. A fantastic range of 8 mm and Super 8 mm cameras can be found for sale on Internet sites, with dedicated websites advocating and discussing 8 mm film practice, equipment, and processes.
As filmmaking shifts into direct digital capture and digital projection at our local cinemas, the resolution (and economic viability) of such digital capture and projection has not yet matched the richness and depth of image as captured on 35 mm and IMAX film (70 mm) formats. The exception is high-definition ‘Red Cinematography’, which has surpassed the resolution of 35 mm. However, the editing platforms and high-resolution monitors and screens required to handle the massive amount of digitised information have not been developed sufficiently to display the Red camera’s ultra-high-end resolution capabilities due to its prohibitive economic cost. But the time is coming when the prohibitive cost of digital production, storage, and display capabilities will no longer be an obstacle or barrier to experience the richest and most detailed image resolution. Through all of this, what will endure will be filmmaking’s concepts, aesthetics, and vernacular of practice, which will live on to inspire as digital moves into the future. Thus, film language (and its study) will remain relevant and viable regardless of the technological and mechanical forms created for image capture and dissemination. Hence, the pursuit and goal of the filmmaker will remain one of developing and creating an individual and unique personal signature in furtherance of carving out a particular creative ‘voice’ through cinematic language, a cinematic language that needs to honed, crafted, and broadly debated.
FILM GRAMMAR
Grammar is broadly defined in the dictionary as:
• an examination of how words and their constituent parts combine to form sentences;
• an examination of structural relationships, including pronunciation, meaning, and linguistic history;
• a system of nuance, syntax, and word formation; and
• a system of rules implicit in a particular language, viewed as a mechanism for producing all probable sentences.
Drawing from this definition, we can now distinguish what constitutes the language of film and its corresponding grammar. We need to be able construct our visual sentence by working to understand how imagery relates to its perception and reception by an audience. This may be entirely a subjective position as the old adage posits, ‘what speaks to one person may not speak to another’. It is true that a particular film we may enjoy, which speaks to us intellectually or emotionally, may not resonant with others at, or on, the same level. How many discussions, arguments, and debates have we had with friends and family over a particular film on whether it was a fulfilling emotional experience or one of indifference or boredom? How can it be that a filmmaker has worked so diligently to present the strongest and most dynamic imagery, dialogue, and acting, yet the film may fail to spark, or speak to, an audience? Is it that the filmmaker has not understood film language? This question cannot be answered fully as all forms of artistic endeavour and storytelling artefacts are formed from a limitless arrangement of factors (including those personality traits of the individual filmmaker himself or herself) that constitute expression even though they are drawing from a set number of hardware factors as all films are shot and displayed utilising a uniform set of technological and mechanical parameters (for example, cameras, lenses, lights, dolly, Steadicam, editing platforms, projection, screen). The core hardware is uniform to the production medium, whether film or digital, much in the way that that there are endless ways to create music but its production emanates from a set number of notes, again like our alphabet with its 26 symbols that our spoken language derives from. It is not the amount of notes (or letters) that change, but the arrangement of these notes, which can be composed infinitely. The same principle applies to film. The capture and dissemination apparatus for motion imagery is predetermined but the assembly of film grammar that expresses that imagery is boundless.
We may call this mise en scène, a French cinematic term indicating what elements the director consciously arranges within the camera frame. This populated frame is what the filmmaker utilises to project to the audience information, or an intended emotion, through a particular shot, scene, or sequence to send its message, whether coded by shared social signifiers such as politics, civics, customs, norms, dress, speech and/or implanted through shape, colour, character positioning and movement, depth of horizon, object placement, lighting, and frame size. The notion that a cinematic visual sentence is demonstrated through a narrative construct is witnessed in the shooting script where each shot is (and should be) notated and meticulously planned out. This ‘sentence’ is then transposed into a series of storyboards, which function to visually pre-write the shot, scene, or sequence in a way that the director wishes to realise on screen.
Counter to Christian Metz’s considerate focus on symbolic representation in cinema is French theorist, philosopher, and essayist André Bazin (1918–58), who wrote a series of seminal works on film as a reflector of ‘realism’, including an essay on cinematic grammar entitled The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, where he expounds on the notion that filmmaking, being ‘mechanical’ in nature, is innately a purveyor of the ‘real world’. Bazin argues that cinema is but a technical advancement developed to promote ‘realistic’ ideas and that cinema functions as an evolutionary superior form to that of the painted image and photography; as such, filmmaking constitutes a ‘fingerprint’ or ‘imprint’ of our reality where the film image is but a ‘transfer’ of that reality to the screen. Bazin argues this superiority results from motion film’s ability to capture events and scenarios that depict and convey durations of time that paintings and still photos cannot replicate. Later, we will examine Bazin in further detail in relation to Eisenstein and explore, as a case study, the notion of the realists and the montagists. For now, we can outline Bazin’s effective notions of film language and grammar in furtherance of understanding his argument that cinema functions to capture reality. These cinematic practices, he suggests, include:
• Mise en scène – that which is physically placed within the scene, the collective of situated elements that convey the shot.
• The long take – allowing the scene to play out, generally in a master shot, without resorting to short edited takes or shots.
• Camera movement – physical camera motion throughout a particular shot (for example, the tracking shot).
• Deep focus (depth of field) – all elements within the frame are, and remain, in focus.
Bazin highlighted these cinematic elements as historically occurring in the early 1940s, emanating with director Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939) and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), along with the Italian neorealists, such as Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession) (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945), and Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946). Bazin identifies and argues that these particular films and filmmakers, among others of that period, have developed, undergone, and represent an evolutionary stylist shift from the Soviet-based (and silent cinema’s) imagist film language form to one of a realist film language form that fulfils the medium’s genuine narrative capabilities (we will discuss imagist and realist in more detail further on). Alternatively to Bazin’s concepts, Russian filmmaker V.I. Pudovkin (1893–1953) argues that each shot requires an original aim to maintain value and integrity, while extended shots (long takes) were not effective to induce ‘true drama’ in a way that the juxtaposition of images is capable of achieving on screen. These debates continue to this day as filmmakers draw from these divergent theoretical models in terms of how these film grammar models can, or should, inform one’s own creative aesthetic and shot choices. As students, it would be wise to experiment with these concepts as you make your initial films and develop your personal creativity.
EXERCISE FILM GRAMMAR
Construct and shoot a particular scene from a script you are writing, collaborated on or have commissioned, with a mind to creating a myriad of shots that...
