In his book Forms and Substances in the Arts, first published in 1966, Etienne Gilson ended with a chapter on theater. In that chapter, he mentions as a footnote a “new material in search of its form”. Film, which Gilson described as a derivative of theater, was a booming “new material” by the time he published his book. By the 1960s, the cinema or film has already grown as an established industry in many places, including France. In fact, the 1960s was the era in which the so-called French New Wave developed. Undoubtedly, Gilson was familiar with all of these movements. Yet, in his book, he did not find it plausible to think of film then as an art form at par with theater. Even so, Gilson did mention that “the cinema has an interest in seeking its paths outside those of theater, even of faked theater”. He, perhaps, thought that film during his time was on its way to establishing itself as a separate art form from theater. It may, however, be unfair to think that film is faked theater, as Gilson called it. At present, film is, undoubtedly, one of the more popular art forms, and has successfully distinguished itself from theater. Having said all these, this paper will attempt to discuss film as an art form with elements distinctly belonging to it and how these elements make up what is now considered as the form of film.
To be able to discuss the form of film, it is necessary to spend some time talking about the elements of film, which are also its primary matter. Admittedly, some of these elements had been derived from theatre. One such element would be acting, and all the other components that come along with it – the actors, the dialogue. Nevertheless, acting is present in film in a different way than it is present in theater. Gilson himself already said something about this obvious difference in the same footnote quoted above. In theater, the character ceases to exist as soon as the actor has stopped playing the role at the end of the play. In film, the actor may have ceased to play the role but the character remains “alive” in the film. The being, so to speak, of the character survives. Film, then, has a take on acting that is very different from that of theater.
Another element would be lighting, which is part of stage development in theater. In film, lighting plays a very important role, much more than it does on theater. Lighting is a powerful tool for story telling. By itself, the way a particular scene in a film is lighted (or not lighted) already sets the mood, and gives the viewer a certain feel that is necessary to understand the particular scene. This is one of the tools the director uses to deliver the film in the way he wants it, for the film to take on the form the director wishes it to have.
A third element, which uniquely belongs to film, is what has been termed as cinematography. This element deals with anything that has to do with the camera, a major instrument in the production of film, for without it, film would not exist. Cinematography covers camera movement: the shots, the pans, the focuses, etc. Many great directors have been renowned for their genius with the techniques of the camera. Just to sight an example, in Citizen Kane (which many critics claim to be the best film of all time), director and actor Orson Wells popularized a technique which has come to be known as deep focus. Using sophisticated cameras, nowadays it is not such a challenge to use this technique. In 1941, however, the year when Wells made the film, such sophistication was not available. Deep focus is carried out by using a single camera to take a scene, where the background and foreground would both appear clear and sharp. In any case, cinematography is indeed a primary matter that the director as an artist manipulates to create his art, to make a film.
These elements are all brought together by the director using the camera. The challenge that the director has to face is this: how will he tell a story using all of these elements, the primary matter for his film? Film tells the story not simply through the script or the words uttered by the characters. The totality of film tells the story. It is everything that the director puts into it – or removes from it – that tells the story. Once the film has been made, the director has already done his masterpiece and very rarely can he change it, if at all. Nevertheless, following Gilson, it is not because a film tells a story that makes it beautiful, although storytelling in itself has its own beauty. It is not telling a story that the director as an artist primarily wants to achieve in a film. It is, rather, how he will tell the story through his film. The beauty of film lies not in the story but on how the director puts together the elements as primary matter to tell the story.
A filmmaker of note is Stan Brakhage, who made films from 1952 to 2002. Brakhage is not an ordinary filmmaker. His films were all unconventional by commercial standards. From his very first film, called Interim, up to his last film, the Lovesong series, Brakhage has constantly defied the ordinary. His techniques vary from unusually jumpy editing (an element that will be discussed later on) to painting on or scratching the actual film strip. Brakhage had a different vision for film. He challenged the normal idea of a narrative. Brian Frye, in his article on Stan Brakhage, wrote:
With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously. Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the world. The vast majority of Brakhage's films are entirely silent. When you watch his films, you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a means of relating images to one another, Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.
Brakhage, in this sense, successfully gave his films their own form. The form his films took was near what some would call a pure form, devoid entirely of meaning other than what it shows. Yet, even Brakhage made us of secondary matter, such as the themes or the inspirations for some of his works. In any case, Stan Brakhage did make use of the same film elements mentioned above. It was his unconventional method of putting these elements together that was clearly his own. A question one can put forward on Stan Brakhage is this: Is it beautiful? Brakhage’s emphasis on visual experience went even to the extreme of showing gory images. One film, called The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, showed the process of conducting an autopsy in full color. It may well be a matter of taste because Brakhage does have fans of his own who appreciate his taste for film.
To be able to tell a story, the film director makes use of the different elements mentioned above. An important step that caps the filmmaking process is called editing. Editing has been defined as “the work of selecting and joining together shots to create a finished film”. At present, editing has been a key process in filmmaking. It is in editing where the shots and scenes are put together, where the entire film actually makes sense. It is because of editing that the film takes on a flow, a certain storyline. It is because of editing that the shots made throughout the shooting of the film achieve unity. Without editing, the shots remain shots, maybe even without any particular order. Just as brushstrokes make it possible for the painter to arrange the colors in the way he wants, editing makes it possible for a filmmaker to create the film he wants. Filmmaking, indeed, is a complex process.
At present, films have grown to include other art forms. At the dawn of the talkies or sound, film has been more receptive to music. Music has been part of many of the great movies of all time. Even the Oscar Awards has a category for Best Soundtrack and Best Musical Score, to distinguish between those with song and those simply with music. There have been films that were musicals, and even the guru of silent films, Charlie Chaplin, used a song in his movie Modern Times – where Chaplin’s voice was heard for the first time on film in a song. Musical scores have also been used to add to the mood and the overall effect of certain scenes in a film. In the film Sixth Sense, which starred Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, made use of good musical scoring in the ending scene of the film, when the character of Bruce Willis discovered that he was already dead. To illustrate that he had been dead already, a technique called flashback was used several times, while cutting into the actual scene which shows his realization. All of this was accompanied by a musical score which was also telling the story in its musicality.
The director, M. Night Shyamalan, did not just use music to capture the audience. The viewer was lead into not suspecting that the character of Willis was dead already through the combination of lighting, camera angles, even editing, and through the dialogue. All these elements lead to that moment when, finally, everything was revealed. Even the object that revealed everything was a simple ring, the wedding ring of Willis’ character. The beauty of it lies precisely in how Shyamalan combined everything to deliver the story.
It would be appropriate to mention another development in filmmaking. The advent of what is called computer generated images (or CGI) and animation marked another step in film. CGI began simply as a tool for editing films, such as The Matrix. Nowadays, however, it has been it possible to produce film simply out of CGI and full animation. Films like Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, Happy Feet, Beowulf, and many others have been made completely out of computer graphics. In such cases, the only human element that remains in the film is the presence of the voice actors. Voice actors are not, strictly speaking, true actors. For one, there is the absence of actual dialogue between two persons. In truth, voice acting is simply reading from a script. Even in the actual recording, each character’s voices were recorded separately. There is no actual dialogue between the voice actors. They are simply put together in the final version of the animation. In this sense, there is no element of film left in animations. Perhaps animation can be likened to drawing with respect to painting. Yet, while it cannot be denied that animation can be beautiful in its own right, it cannot properly be considered a form of film. It could be that animation – understood as moving drawings – in itself is a distinct art form.
Film, surely, has grown into an art in itself. It may have begun simply as a derivative of theater, but it has grown since then into a completely distinct art form, with elements that properly belong to it alone. Film directors are artists in their own right, applying their particular knowledge of cinematography, lighting, and acting into the film, finishing it with some techniques on editing. It is, perhaps, one of the most accessible and more familiar art forms at present. True appreciation of the beauty of film is more accessible to many people. Ordinary people watch films not to know a story, not to learn a lesson, not to look at an insight in human life or in reality. While these may be present, ordinary people go to the cinemas or movie houses simply to be entertained, to enjoy. That enjoyment may come at varying levels, but ultimately, it comes simply from watching the film. Film, indeed, is an art of the beautiful.
