For formalists, film artistry lies not in the materials per se, but in the way that they’re taken apart and then reconstructed expressively.
Hitchcock and Pure Cinema
Hitchcock, influenced by Pudovkin, has said: “The screen ought to speak its own language, freshly coined, and it can’t do that unless it treats an acted scene as a piece of raw material which must be broken up, taken to bits, before it can be woven into an expressive visual pattern.”
Principles:
Unity vs. diversity
Similarity vs. difference
Development vs. change
Basic Concepts
Sequence (Narrative Structure):
A sequence is a series of brief scenes that are joined in a formal or thematic way that suggests they constitute a unit that’s part of the film’s narrative.
Film sequence is the equivalent of an act in the theater, or a chapter in a book.
In many movies, changes in contexts or settings indicate the end of one sequence and the beginning of another.
Film and Music
For some, formalism means pure cinema, namely, piecing together the fragmentary shots, like individual notes of music that, when combined, produce a melody, a song.
—
Formalism luxuriates in the artificial.
Film is unlike everyday reality.
Giametti, 468
Formalism favors the pleasure principle, the supremacy of pattern over life, of aesthetic richness over literal truth
Visual appeal of shapes, lines, textures, colors, images.
Real world is a repository of raw materials that need to be shaped and heightened to be effective as art.
Film art is not reproduction of reality, but changes it
What makes photography fall short of perfect reproduction is what makes cinema an art.
Focus on divergence between camera’s images and the human eye.
POV: not necessarily the clearest, but one that emphasizes the point of a scene.
Mise en scene–placement of objects, arrangement of space and time in meaningful way through editing.
In real life, space and time are experienced as continuous.
Concern with patterns, methods of restructuring reality into design.
(End of Giametti)
Kael
If we are formalists and reject a work because it is not totally good, then we may close ourselves off from the new emotional experiences of recent films (Kael).
It’s easy to be aesthetically fastidious and put Down Zorba the Greek or The Pawnbroker as clumsy or mechanical or pretentious as they are, and to point out that, despite their superficial modernism of language or technique. they’re basically traditional.
Film Theory: Formalism–Principles, Concepts, Films
Dec 24, 2023–1753
Film Theory: Formalism–
For formalists, film artistry lies not in the materials per se, but in the way that they’re taken apart and then reconstructed expressively.
Hitchcock and Pure Cinema
Hitchcock, influenced by Pudovkin, has said: “The screen ought to speak its own language, freshly coined, and it can’t do that unless it treats an acted scene as a piece of raw material which must be broken up, taken to bits, before it can be woven into an expressive visual pattern.”
Principles:
Unity vs. diversity
Similarity vs. difference
Development vs. change
Basic Concepts
Sequence (Narrative Structure):
A sequence is a series of brief scenes that are joined in a formal or thematic way that suggests they constitute a unit that’s part of the film’s narrative.
Film sequence is the equivalent of an act in the theater, or a chapter in a book.
In many movies, changes in contexts or settings indicate the end of one sequence and the beginning of another.
Film and Music
For some, formalism means pure cinema, namely, piecing together the fragmentary shots, like individual notes of music that, when combined, produce a melody, a song.
—
Formalism luxuriates in the artificial.
Film is unlike everyday reality.
Giametti, 468
Formalism favors the pleasure principle, the supremacy of pattern over life, of aesthetic richness over literal truth
Visual appeal of shapes, lines, textures, colors, images.
Real world is a repository of raw materials that need to be shaped and heightened to be effective as art.
Film art is not reproduction of reality, but changes it
What makes photography fall short of perfect reproduction is what makes cinema an art.
Focus on divergence between camera’s images and the human eye.
POV: not necessarily the clearest, but one that emphasizes the point of a scene.
Mise en scene–placement of objects, arrangement of space and time in meaningful way through editing.
In real life, space and time are experienced as continuous.
Concern with patterns, methods of restructuring reality into design.
(End of Giametti)
Kael
If we are formalists and reject a work because it is not totally good, then we may close ourselves off from the new emotional experiences of recent films (Kael).
It’s easy to be aesthetically fastidious and put Down Zorba the Greek or The Pawnbroker as clumsy or mechanical or pretentious as they are, and to point out that, despite their superficial modernism of language or technique. they’re basically traditional.