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CHAPTER 2
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FILM FORM
Chapter Outline
The Concept of Form in Film
Form as Pattern
“Form” Versus “Content”
Formal Expectations
Conventions and Experience
Form and Feeling
Form and Meaning
Evaluation: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?
Principles of Film Form
Function
Similarity and Repetition
Difference and Variation
Development
Unity and Disunity
A Closer Look: Creative Decisions; Picking out Patterns
Summary
Teaching “The Significance of Film Form”
The Purpose of the Chapter
Chapter 2 suggests why close analysis of films is important.
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The concept of the film’s form as a system is introduced early in the chapter. We stress
that films are not random collections of technical devices. This picks up on the Chapter
1 emphasis on films as made objects. Similarly, it establishes Film Art’s emphasis on
looking at films as wholes. Most of the chapters contain extended examples that
examine film techniques in their contexts.
Much of the first half of Chapter 2 is devoted to explaining how the spectator reacts
actively to the film, forming expectations, drawing on previous knowledge of
conventions, reacting emotionally to what occurs on the screen, interpreting it, and
evaluating the whole experience.
The second half of the chapter lays out the principles of film form. It also explains the
concept of segmentation, or breaking a film down into parts for the purposes of analysis.
All of these concepts will be crucial to the more specific subjects of later chapters.
Lecturing On and Discussing Film Form
Since it is vital that the students understand the basic concepts in this chapter, it might
be valuable to simply go over these in class, giving additional examples. You might wish
to illustrate your lecture with a short film containing a very obvious formal structure.
Some possibilities would be Hilary Harris’s Nine Variations on a Dance Theme, which
presents the same dance filmed in nine successively more distorting styles, Robert
Clampett’s cartoon, A Corny Concerto, with its two short segments parodying Fantasia,
and Robert Enrico’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which contains a frame story and
Assigning a Paper on Segmentation
It is important for students to learn as soon as possible how to notice the large-scale
parts of films. There are at least two ways of doing this, and you can choose to assign
one or both. First, you can ask them to take notes on when scenes in the film you show
that week begin and end. Then, in discussion, draw a horizontal line on the blackboard
and make marks along it to indicate scenes, labeling each. Not every student will be
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able to keep track of every scene upon a single viewing, but among them they usually
can come up with a good basic segmentation. (They must, however, be told in advance
that this exercise will be part of the discussion.) For this purpose, it is a good idea to
choose a film made primarily from lengthy scenes (for example, His Girl Friday) rather