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

An imagined film like this may be made up of many things: photographic emulsions, light, lines, colors, shapes, representations (and their subjects), points of view, expressive properties, theses, and injunctions. Moreover, this list could be even longer if our descriptions of the various dimensions of the film were more finely drawn. Which of all these sorts of things that can be said to make up the content of the film is the content of the film? The problem is that, at various times and in various contexts, any of these things or combinations thereof can be and have been identified as the content of films. But that renders the distinction between form and content unstable.

If we identify the content of a film with its lines, colors, and closed shapes, then not only is that at odds with the way in which we typically identify these elements in film, but it also leaves little else for film form to be. If the lines, colors, and closed shapes of the film do not constitute the formal elements of the film, then what does? Is there a way of handling the lines, colors, and closed shapes that is separable from these features? If shape and color are content elements in a film, and it is a nonrepresentational film, what is the form of the film? One might say that the form of the film is some emergent property of the colors and shapes - an expressive property, for example - but, then, expressive properties are usually taken to be part of the content of the work, not part of its form.

So, on the one hand, if one tries to deal with "contentless" films, by identifying their colors and shapes as the relevant content - to say that these films are about colors and shapes - then the film has no form. On the other hand, if one identifies the colors and shapes of such a film as its form, that identification is paradoxical, since on the view under consideration, there is no form without content. This is certainly an unsatisfying dilemma.

In fact, another reason that it is impossible to distinguish film form from film content (on the supposition that content is whatever makes up the film) is that speaking this broadly, form is undeniably one of the things that make up a film. Some might, of course, embrace the notion that there is no difference between form and content at this juncture, as the philosopher Croce did, but that scarcely helps in distinguishing the nature of film form.

In order to forestall difficulties like this, one might try to revert to ordinary language. In everyday speech, we frequently restrict content terminology to what the film represents. The content of the film is what it represents - its subject (for example, the impoverished child) and whatever its says about its subject. In this vein, we might say that the shapes and colors of the film are the formal elements that are deployed in a certain manner to articulate the content of the film - to represent the child and/or to represent her in a certain light or for a certain purpose.

But it is far from clear that the invocation of representation here will draw a reliable distinction between form and content. Think of point of view as a feature of films. It is a representational element of a film - one, for example, that is often connected to the theme of a work (what it says about its subject). Hatred of racism, for instance, might describe the point of view of a film. Since it is a representational feature of the work, it seems as though, according to ordinary language, it should count as a feature of the content of the film. And yet isn't it a formal feature as well? Isn't it a result of the way in which the representational material is being handled? Moreover, if we adopt the popular analogy that form is to content as a container is to the contained, isn't the point of view of a film that in which all the representational elements of the film are contained? Thus, invoking concept of representation won't determinately mark the boundary between form and content for us.