Film form: an argument for a functional theory of style in the individual film - Style in Cinema

The form of the individual film comprises the collection of formal choices that enable the realization of its points or purposes. Films, of course, may have more than one point and/or purpose, and these may be co-ordinated, as may be the subtending systems of formal articulations designed to realize them. But in other films, formal choices may not be interconnected or mutually reinforcing where they still nevertheless enable different purposes. Yet whether co-ordinated or not, formal choices are always functional contributions to the purposes of the film. And the form of the individual film is made up of all its formal choices - fall the formal articulations in the film that function to realize its purposes (its overall purposes, or the purposes of a particular part, such as a sequence of the film).

For obvious reasons, I call this the functional account of film form. According to the functional account of film form,the form of an individual film is the ensemble of choices intended to realize the point or the purpose of the film. This approach to film form is different from the descriptive account. The descriptive account Says that the form of the film is the sum total of all the relations between the elements of the film. The functional account says that film form comprises only the elements and relations intended to serve as the means to the end of the film.

This account could include all the relations in a film, if they were all intended to serve the purposes of the film, but that occurs at most rarely, if ever, despite flowery critical language that sometimes commends films for being totalized organic wholes. Thus, almost (if not all) of the time, analyses of the form of an individual film that accord with the functional account will be far less exhaustive than the ideal that the descriptive account of film form encourages. And this approach, of course, conforms better to the way in which we usually discuss film form than does the descriptive account. The descriptive account is much broader than the functional account, and the former, logically speaking, includes the latter. But the descriptive account is far too broad to provide a useful framework for discussing film form.

The functional account also differs from attempts to approach film form through the contrast between form and content. That way of speaking restricts film form solely to films with specifiable content. But by speaking of the point or purpose of the film, rather than solely in terms of content, the functional account is broader than the form/content account. Of course, where the point of a film is to advance something typically thought of as content (a theme, for example), the functional account will attend to the same formal features as does the form/content account. However, the functional account can also accommodate "contentless" films, which is one of the sticking points of the form/content approach.

That is, the functional account is a richer approach than the form/content approach, since it will be capable of tracking film form where there is a point to a film, but nothing that we standardly refer to as content. For example, films whose purpose is to provoke a perceptual state in the audience will still possess form according to the functional account - the form will involve whatever configurations promote the intended effect - while the form/content approach has no way of speaking of film form where the correlative category of content is inoperative. Thus, logically the functional account of film form accommodates everything that the form/content approach covers, while not being so restrictive. In this respect, the functional account lies conceptually somewhere between the descriptive account and the form/content account, being less inclusive than the former and less exclusive than the latter.