by Oliver Spicer.
Completeness is one of the desirable traits of watching and studying films.
The long duration of a feature film allows for a wholeness through the narrative by depicting a complete change in the characters, problems, and world of the story between the opening and ending credits. Whilst photography and painting can only depict a moment in time - films can describe the tapestry of events in a story.
But this is also true for television, where character arcs and plots are completed in a single episode or series. However, unlike television films are individual works - making referring and studying them simpler as you can write about the entirety of a film without fragmenting into episodes.
An initial dispute to this completeness would be that films are not whole due to sequels and series that aim to interlink and continue stories - or that many directors give films vague beginnings and open endings to divert away from the status-quo and more closely represent the lack of closure in our lives.
But a much stronger argument is that film is fundamentally fractured - formed entirely from smaller segments that come together to create a whole. Through this perspective, we can divide film into smaller and smaller chunks: from acts, to scenes, to shots, to frames, and beyond; then recombine the smaller segments to see how film can be divided and combined.
First, we can split the narrative of a film into acts: sections of the plot that have the same overall aim.
Most divide into a three-act-structure where the first introduces the world and characters (often called exposition), then there is a problem that is worked at and solved until the last act, where the problem is solved and its outcomes are shown. This is treated as a 'traditional' structure, seen as an ideal way to create tension and satisfaction in a audience used from ancient plays to modern pop-cinema.
Sometimes a division into two is more appropriate - where narratives can be cut where a character shifts their behaviour, when the world of the film changes, or when the style of presentation switches.
There are even some films that divide themselves into acts - films like Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) or The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021) are split up via inter-titles and massive diversions in aesthetic presentation. This not only makes segmentation easier for us, but also breaks the spectators immersion to comment on the constructed nature of narratives.
Then we can cut more finely into narrative through dividing acts into scenes: sections that have the same location or objective. Location because a change in the background (conveniently called scenery) is an easy way to spot a switch in scenes. In screenwriting, scenes are what divide up a script - with each location having a log-line in capitals to emphasise a change in space.
But many directors like conversations to spill over different locations like in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010) and Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) meaning that objective can be used as another method to differentiate scenes, where the character and the writing of the scene itself has a clear overall aim. Hollywood Montages that condense an action such as a character training or travelling set to music is a similar problem - as although there is a variety of locations there is an overall goal to the scene.
By the end of a scene something in the story will have changed, often the character slightly resolving the problem or falling more deeply into it. This leads a smaller sense of satisfaction to scenes - making them short stories within themselves and often the most memorable aspects of a film.
Next, we can divide scenes into a series of shots: moments between cuts that act as moving pictures.
A flaw to this definition could be seen as the existence of films that attempt to be only one continuous shot such as Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) , 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019) , or Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002) . But it is the presence of camera movements in cinema, which is used heavily in the films mentioned above, that is a contridiction; when a camera pans from one subject to another, the overall content and meaning of the frame has changed - it's a cut that uses movement as a transition instead of actually being a single shot. This can be seen on storyboards where multiple drawings are made to describe a dolly, tilt, ore change in focus.
To go even further, a shot can be divided into a series of frames: single images that are combined to create movement. These too stick in the audiences head, with the most celebrated shots beings a grand gesture to the artistic nature of cinematography and composition or moments in the narrative that are perfectly emblematic of the theme or mood of a film: hence why they become the memorabilia of certain films and are transferred to the real world through posters, t-shirts, and mugs.
But the frames that are simply moments in a movement, blurred half-way points of people talking or walking should be equally celebrated. As they show the unique ability of film, breaking down actions into a series of images.
And although this may seem like the perfect place to stop, we should not assume this is the smallest element of film. Atoms were theorised to be the indivisible particles of matter, but then they were found to be formed from smaller parts, and those parts could be divided too.
Frames can then be divided into a series of characteristics or aspects - such as how far the camera is away from the subject (Shot Size), what angle the image is taken at (Camera Angle), the props and costumes in the scenes (Mise-en-scene), what the actor looks like (Casting), how they are positioned (Performance)... If we were to shift any one of these aspects the overall meaning of the image would change. Here is possible the smallest unit of cinema, the individual visual aspects that incite a feeling in the viewer - but for true meaning, they must be combined.
When the individual aspects of the frame combine to form an image, they must have a sense of visual continuity. This can first be achieved through composition matching content - such as close ups being used for talking faces and long shots used for grand landscapes. But to fully homogenise a frame there must be an aesthetic continuity, such as a colour palette used for props and costumes or effects such as film grain or digital compression to create a similar overall look.
But when we get to the task of combining frames to form a shot, the focus on similarity changes. In fact, each frame needs to be different enough from the last to create a sense of animated movement but similar enough to be thought of as the same shot - a paradoxical balance noted by theorist Louis Jean-Bauldry. Here, a similar difference groups frames together to create shots.
There are multiple approaches to assembling shots together to form a scene. In traditional Hollywood filmmaking editing was made to feel invisible and natural through devices such as cutting on a action between shots (match-on-action) or cutting to a character's perspective when they look away (eyeline-match). This use of editing to hide itself was called continuity, aiming to preserve the notion of a time and space created in the film.
However, after the Soviet Montagists discovered that the interpretation of a shot depended almost entirely on its position a sequence - this taste for continuity editing was switched to a much stylistic kind that cut together juxtaposing or linked images to create visual metaphors within films. Here, difference is shown to be key again - as it is the contrast in the meaning of images that compounds to create ever complex interpretation.
In a similar way, when scenes are combined into acts their meaning relies on their surrounding context. Many of the best scenes from cinema history are a films ending, and it is not because the audience are relieved the cinematic experience is over - but that the narrative has collected meaning over its duration from previous films that is placed on the final moments.
Finally, when acts are combined into the final film - there is a similarity in message. Even in the examples where the acts are unrelated, the audience will try and find links between the different separate acts that combine to form an overall topic on a film. This is usually the final conclusion of film studies, that a film makes a comment on a certain topic in life, society, relationships that can be reverse-engineered through looking at the smaller aspects of the film.
But now we can continue combining to look at how individual films are collected into series.
Series have always been important to cinema - from a studio perspective it makes economic sense to continue or iterate upon a successful story, and the audience benefits by wanting more content surrounding a film. This is increasingly more important in the current climate of the MCU - with films and their sequels becoming increasingly interconnected.
Beyond series of films, we can group a film and its series into genres depending on similar tropes, styles, and sometimes even cast. Like series this is beneficial for both producing films and watching them - as films can be marketed by linking to previous successful contributions to a genre and if an audience member enjoys one film, it is likely they will enjoy the rest of the genre. Of course combining films becomes tricky here due to films having multiple genres and genres being fractured themselves - but this only makes looking at genre even more interesting as it is the outliers that twist and combine tropes from many genres that illustrate how
And finally, really finally, we can combine all the genres into the universe that is the entirety of cinema. Every film from time-period, director, genre, topic combined - always expanding. Some films have reviews and books about them that stacked on top of each over are taller than the cinema screen itself, others have been lost to obsolete technology or unpopularity or fire if you're dealing with highly flammable celluloid film in an era where everyone smoked. But they're all there and require each other to be understood in terms of narrative, film form, and meaning.
by Oliver Spicer, July 2022.