B0041VYHGW EBOK (23 page)

Very often people think of “form” as the opposite of something called “content.” This implies that a poem or a musical piece or a film is like a jug. An external shape, the jug,
contains
something that could just as easily be held in a cup or a pail. Under this assumption, form becomes less important than whatever it’s presumed to contain.

We don’t accept this assumption. If form is the total system that the viewer attributes to the film, there is no inside or outside. Every component
functions as part of the overall pattern
that engages the viewer. So we’ll treat as formal elements many things that some people consider content. From our standpoint, subject matter and abstract ideas all enter into the total system of the artwork. They may cue us to frame certain expectations or draw certain inferences. The viewer relates such elements to one another dynamically. Consequently, subject matter and ideas become somewhat different from what they might be outside the work.

Consider a historical subject, such as the American Civil War. The real Civil War may be studied, its causes and consequences disputed. But in a film such as D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation,
the Civil War is not neutral content. It enters into relationships with other elements: a story about two families, political ideas about the Reconstruction, and the epic film style of the battle scenes. Griffith’s film depicts the Civil War in a way that is coordinated with other elements in the film. A different film by another filmmaker might draw on the same subject matter, the Civil War, but there the subject would play a different role in a different formal system. In
Gone with the Wind,
the Civil War functions as a backdrop for the heroine’s romance, but in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
the war aids three cynical men in their search for gold. Thus subject matter is shaped by the film’s formal context and our perceptions of it.

We’re now in a better position to see how film form guides the audience’s activity. Why does an interrupted song or an uncompleted story frustrate us? Because of our urge for form. We realize that the system of relationships within the work has not yet been completed. Something more is needed to make the form whole and satisfying. We have been caught up in the interrelations among elements, and we want to develop and complete the patterns.

One way in which form affects our experience, then, is to create the sense that “everything is there.” Why is it satisfying when a character glimpsed early in a film reappears an hour later, or when a shape in the frame is balanced by another shape? Because such relations among parts suggest that the film has its own organizing laws or rules—its own system.

Moreover, an artwork’s form creates a special sort of involvement on the part of the spectator. In everyday life, we perceive things around us in a practical way. But in a film, the things that happen on the screen serve no such practical end for us. We can see them differently. In life, if someone fell down on the street, we would probably hurry to help the person up. But in a film, when Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin falls, we laugh. We shall see in
Chapter 5
how even as basic an act of film-making as framing a shot creates a particular way of seeing. We watch a pattern that is no longer just “out there” in the everyday world; it has become a calculated part within a self-contained whole. Film form can even make us perceive things anew, shaking us out of our accustomed habits and suggesting fresh ways of hearing, seeing, feeling, and thinking.

To get a sense of the ways in which purely formal features can involve the audience, try the following experiment. Assume that “A” is the first letter of a series. What follows?

AB

“A” was a cue, and on this basis, you made a formal hypothesis, probably that the letters would run in alphabetical order. Your expectation was confirmed. What follows AB? Most people would say “C.” But form does not always follow our initial expectation:

ABA

Here form takes us a little by surprise. If we are puzzled by a formal development, we readjust our expectations and try again. What follows ABA?

ABAC

Here the main possibilities were either ABAB or ABAC. (Note that your expectations
limit
possibilities as well as select them.) If you expected ABAC, your expectation was gratified, and you can confidently predict the next letter. If you expected ABAB, you still should be able to make a strong hypothesis about the next letter:

ABACA

Simple as this game is, it illustrates the involving power of form. You as a viewer or listener don’t simply let the parts parade past you. You enter into an active participation with them, creating and readjusting expectations as the pattern develops.

Now consider a story in a film.
The Wizard of Oz
begins with Dorothy running down a road with her dog
(
2.1
).
Immediately, we form
expectations.
Perhaps she will meet another character or arrive at her destination. Even such a simple action asks the audience to participate actively in the ongoing process by wondering about what will happen next and readjusting expectations accordingly. Much later in the film, we come to expect that Dorothy will get her wish to return to Kansas. Indeed, the settings of the film give
The Wizard of Oz
a large-scale ABA form: Kansas-Oz-Kansas.

Expectation pervades our experience of art. In reading a mystery, we expect that a solution will be offered at some point, usually the end. In listening to a piece of music, we expect repetition of a melody or a motif. (Songs that alternate verses and refrains follow the ABACA pattern we have just outlined.) In looking at a painting, we search for what we expect to be the most significant features, then scan the less prominent portions. From beginning to end, our involvement with a work of art depends largely on expectations.

This does not mean that the expectations must be immediately satisfied. The satisfaction of our expectations may be delayed. In our alphabet exercise, instead of presenting ABA, we might have presented this:

AB …

The ellipsis puts off the revelation of the next letter, and you must wait to find it out. What we normally call
suspense
involves a delay in fulfilling an established expectation. As the term implies, suspense leaves something suspended—not only the next element in a pattern but also our urge for completion.

Expectations may also be cheated, as when we expect ABC but get ABA. In general,
surprise
is a result of an expectation that is revealed to be incorrect. We do not expect that a gangster in 1930s Chicago will find a rocket ship in his garage; if he does, our reaction may require us to readjust our assumptions about what can happen in this story. (This example suggests that comedy often depends on cheating expectations.)

One more pattern of our expectations needs tracing. Sometimes an artwork will cue us to hazard guesses about what has come
before
this point in the work. When Dorothy runs down the road at the beginning of
The Wizard of Oz,
we wonder not only where she is going but where she’s been and what she’s fleeing from. Similarly, a painting or photograph may depict a scene that asks the viewer to speculate on some earlier event. Let’s call this ability of the spectator to wonder about prior events
curiosity.
As
Chapter 3
will show, curiosity is an important factor in narrative form.

Already we have several possible ways in which the artwork can actively engage us. Artistic form may cue us to make expectations and then gratify them. They may be gratified quickly or after a delay. Or form may work to disturb our expectations. We often associate art with peace and serenity, but many artworks offer us conflict, tension, and shock. An artwork’s form may even strike us as unpleasant because of its imbalances or contradictions. For example, experimental films may jar rather than soothe us. Viewers frequently feel puzzled or shocked by
Eat, Scorpio Rising,
and other avant-garde works (
pp. 366
–367). And we’ll encounter similar problems when we examine the editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s
October
(
Chapter 6
) and the style of Jean-Loc Godard’s
Breathless
(
Chapter 11
).

Yet even in disturbing us, such films still arouse and shape formal expectations. For example, on the basis of our experience of most movie stories, we expect that the main characters introduced in the first half of a film will be present in the second half. Yet this does not happen in Wong Kar-wai’s
Chungking Express
(
pp. 445
–446). When our expectations are thwarted, we may feel disoriented, but then we adjust them to look for other, more appropriate, ways of engaging with the film’s form.

If we can adjust our expectations to a disorienting work, it may involve us deeply. Our uneasiness may lessen as we get accustomed to a work’s unusual formal system. Hollis Frampton’s
Zorns Lemma,
for example, slowly trains the viewer to associate a series of images with the letters of the alphabet. Viewers often become quite absorbed in watching the series take shape as a cinematic picture puzzle. As
Chungking Express
and
Zorns Lemma
also suggest, a disturbing work can reveal to us our normal expectations about form. Such films are valuable because they coax us to reflect on our taken-for-granted assumptions about how a movie must behave.

There is no limit to the number of ways in which a film can be organized. Some films will ask us to recast our expectations in drastic ways. Still, our enjoyment of the cinema can increase if we welcome the unfamiliar experiences offered by formally challenging films.

Our ABAC example illustrates still another point. One guide to your expectations is your
prior experience.
Your knowledge of the English alphabet makes ABA an unlikely sequence. This fact suggests that aesthetic form is not a pure activity isolated from other experiences.

Because artworks are human creations and because the artist lives in history and society, he or she cannot avoid relating the work, in some way, to other works and to aspects of the world in general. A tradition, a dominant style, a popular form—some such elements will be common to several different artworks. These common traits are usually called
conventions.
For example, the first few scenes of a film often explain background information about the characters and the action; this sort of exposition is a narrative convention.
Genres,
as we will see in
Chapter 9
, depend heavily on conventions. Urban crime thrillers tend to feature spectacular car crashes, so Michael Mann’s use of the device in
Collateral
(
p. 28
) accords with that genre convention. It’s a convention of the musical film that characters sing and dance, as in
The Wixard of Oz.
It’s one convention of narrative form that the conclusion solves the problems that the characters confront, and
Wizard
likewise accepts this convention by letting Dorothy return to Kansas.