When Film Theory Meets Camera: A Story of Film Language

Do we need film theory to make films? Or does theory require filmmaking to establish its postulates? 

Questions of this sort always emerge whenever a discussion or debate of film theory is initiated. These persistent questions lead to closer inspections of the grey area between theory and filmmaking practices and efforts to establish a link connecting them. Here, this author tries to show the correlation between theory and practice by detailing the most prominent filmmaking philosophies and two of the earlier formulations of theorising cinema. 

A closer look at all attempts of theorising cinema reveals an underlying theme or question about the nature of this medium. 

Film Language, or is film a language?

Since films embody, communicate, generate, enforce and suggest meanings, film theorists from the inception of the medium have taken up the stand that films constitute a language.

Such questions arise from the basic assumption that shots in a film are analogous to words in a sentence or a write-up. Words, when simply and randomly arranged, wouldn’t generate a meaningful statement or sentence. Likewise, shots, when randomly stitched together, wouldn’t convey an intelligible message or meaning.

So, there should be a definite way of arrangement. 

This topic of enquiry should be seen along with another important debate that originated around the same time. 

What makes cinema more than a visual recording medium? How is it an art form that arouses deep emotions and aesthetic sensibilities?

Early theorists, especially Soviet theorists like Sergei M Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, believed that editing or the technique of ‘montage’ elevated the film to the status of art (German theorist Rudolf Arnheim also emphasised that multi-framing and employment of multiple shots with camera movements helped film to become an art form). Montage- a series of shots stitched together to convey meaning, a message or information, like the passage of time in the narrative. So, this long combination of shots- scene, sequence and complete film- in a particular and creative manner, that too in a very particular rhythm, created a meaningful film. So, there emerges a cinematic language.

Kuleshov Effect

D. W. Griffith, the great American director of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, employed montage for the first time. So, according to Soviet theorists, it was Griffith who invented a cinematic language for the first time, making film a distinctive art form.

D. W. Griffith

But for these prominent theorists, montage or editing works in different ways.

Eisenstein believed in the ‘collision’ of shots rather than their rhythmic suturing. The collision of a shot with its successor creates a conflict that generates meaning. One shot has a particular iconicity and potential energy- light, direction of movement and shapes. When this shot collides with another with some other iconicity and potential energy, it generates kinetic energy. This creates a violent rhythm to the film. Here, shots operate like words arranged in a creative order in a sentence, and generate meaning by their correlation with each other.

Sergei Eisenstein

So, the dynamic and violent rhythm of films and their respective meaning is generated through collision, a trademark of Eisenstein’s films.

This is in line with Eisenstein’s political outlook- Marxism. Social contradictions and their dialectical opposition lead to the fall and emergence of socio-economic orders. Society moves forward through the dialectical opposition of social forces.

The same applies in Eisenstein’s theory, too. It’s the dialectical opposition or interplay of the shots that generates meaning in a film.

But Pudovkin considers montage as a progress or a method of building, adding one shot to another, to create meaning. This is of not just theoretical interest, but more of professional interest. His theory created more realistic narratives that flowed in a calmer and soothing rhythm.

Vsevolod Pudovkin

Both of these theorists worked in the era of silent films. So, they never thought highly of dialogue and music. Such an attitude led to an ignorant stand when sound arrived in the late 1920s. They believed that the arrival of synchronised dialogue would invalidate montage.

French film critic and pioneer of realism in cinema, Andre Bazin, disapproved of the arguments of Soviet theorists. He considered the synchronised sound as a necessary development in film technology that helps to reflect reality in a more enhanced manner. So, for him, film is not an art form in contrast to nature, but an art form of nature itself. According to him, film should reveal reality as a whole, not by bits joined together.

André Bazin

He advocates a theory of using the camera as a canvas representing the world and reality by thoroughly staging an action in front of it, which came to be known as ‘mise-en-scène’. He cites the examples of filmmakers in the silent era, like Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, and Robert Flaherty, who actually could be seen as the predecessors to the ‘mise-en-scène’ school. Their films show a tendency to convey meaning not through the juxtaposition of images but by the content of visual images.

So, Bazin rejects the analogy of shots to words.

Bazin also talks of German Expressionism and Russian symbolism of the 1930s and 1940s that had developed a new type of editing- ‘analytic editing’- that helped in enhancing the experience of dialogue film. This was symbolised by the famous technique- ‘shot/reverse shot’. Also, another important technical and narrative advance in the late 1940s strengthened Bazin’s arguments- ‘deep focus’. Filmmakers such as Orson Welles and William Wyler were the creative forces behind this. With this, you did not even need ‘analytic editing’ to show everything in a scene. A shot-in-depth could show everything in a scene without even moving the camera. Bazin considered this a crucial step toward total cinema and achieving realism in film, and also a further advance in realising a language of cinema.

Deep Focus shot in Citizen Kane (1941) 

Such long, uninterrupted shots also facilitated enhanced engagement and involvement from the viewers, opening a more nuanced intellectual relationship with the filmic medium.

It is very evident that both Eisenstein and Bazin were fascinated with the idea of film constituting the characteristics of language. Their arguments have informed and laid the foundations of two prominent filmmaking philosophies.

One is the classical narrative cinema, whose most powerful proponent is Hollywood. Hollywood films follow a closely knit, tight narrative structure in which seamless editing gives rise to a narrative rhythm. Each shot comprises some action- through the characters’ interactions, exchanges and the crisis they’re thrown into- and the next shot brings a dramatic progression to it. And towards the end, this problem or crisis is solved, so the action elements diminish. So, the whole film conveys a message or a statement or an emotion or a sequence of emotions that culminate in one. And this is achieved by stitching together shots that have individual emotional ramifications, and they build up a scene and then a sequence that play bigger roles in the narrative progress.

The theory of editing provides meaning to the film is reflected in the evolution of narrative film. This is derived from the theory of editing by Soviet theorists like Eisenstein.

The other is the art cinema. Here, the focus is not on the compactness or progression of the narrative through editing. Here, the whole emphasis is on the mood, atmosphere and the universe that you’re building, not the actions of the characters. So, you need to embody and encapsulate these aspects in the cinematic language. This can only be achieved by displaying the nuances of the atmosphere with minimal to no narrative intervention in the form of editing. It’s the reality being shown, rather than the creative urge of the filmmaker to move on, that has the utmost priority. This is realised by showing the surroundings in detail with uninterrupted long takes in which the camera either moves or stands still.

The only narrative progression in such films is imposed by reality. So, the meaning here is generated through the extensive recording of atmosphere and the coverage of the entire narrative universe by the end of the film. This forms the cinematic language espoused by art films. And it can be seen as derived from the theory of Bazin.

So, we can see that the earlier debates on film language have laid the foundations for leading filmmaking philosophies, shedding light on the active reciprocal interaction between film theory and filmmaking. Theory is essential in forming a film language, and filmmaking theory in return. The relationship between them is not just linear, proportional or synonymous, but something mutually evolving.