Study guide: Structural Approaches to film form and style

Study guide: Structural Approaches to film form and style

by John Cumming

If the links below don't work: for site files simply return to Resources list and scoll to the source file there. For library and online resources, go to the appropriate purple readings list link in the Readings

Objectives

The study outlined here aims to equip you to:

• analyse and discuss a number of approaches to film form and structure
• place your own creative work within an historical context

Readings

Prescribed text

O'Pray, M 2003, Avant-garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions, London: Wallflower (E-Reading).

Cumming, J. ‘Structural Approaches Seminar Notes’ in Resources, ACF301 Independent Production CloudDeakin site, Deakin University 2018.

Sonnenschein, D. "Expanding Creativity" in David Sonnenschein, Sound Design; the expressive power of music, voice, and sound effects in cinema. Michael Wiese Productions, 2001 pp. 53--61.

Supplementary readings

Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. Chapter 2 ‘Film Form’ pp 55-77 in the 9th Edition / 2010 (pp 48-62  7th Ed. /2004) and  ‘Film Style’ (Chapters 4,5, 6, 7, 8, 9) [Book available from bookshop and library]

Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. ‘Rhetorical Form’, ‘Experimental Film’, ‘Style in Ballet Mecanique’ and ‘Style in A Movie’ in ‘Documentary, experimental and animated films’ pp 359-381 (9th Ed. 2010), pp 140-162 & 407-412 (8th Ed. 2004).

Note: This is a supplementary reading providing detailed discussion of film form and style. There are many copies of Film Art in the library or you can order a new copy from the DUSA bookshop or get a second hand copy. You can use any edition of this book. It's just a matter of looking in the Contents section for the chapters listed above.

Film Form – structural aspects

The assessor/s will be expecting you to identify and analyse specific structural aspects in filmmaking when discussing both your research for Assignment 1 and your own filmmaking in Assignment 2. In conventional filmmaking these aspects are usually identified in terms of film form and film style. In all of your reading on film, note how film scholars and critics use specific examples to discuss the different aspects of form and elements of style in detail.

Review concepts of film form and film style. 

In previous units you have learnt the basic elements of film form and film style, we have also discussed some of these in seminars as structural aspects (see also the Structural Approaches Seminar Notes). We identified some of these aspects of form and style in Koyaanisquasi (see Week 1 seminar notes) in the use of sound (music), images, patterns, structures, technologies & techniques and the relationships between these elements – how they work together. In that film many of these structures were quite unique and non-narrative. In week 2 we looked at the first half of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), a film that contains many more of the elements of film form and style we are familiar with including:

• Production Design: the qualities and arrangement of things in front of the camera
• Cinematography: Tone, colour, lighting, movement, shot size and duration, framing, camera angle and movement, lens and perspective.
• Sound: Voice, music, sound effects and atmosphere. Loudness, pitch and rhythm, perspective and point of view of sounds, relations between sounds and between sound & image.
• Editing: The relationship between shots, graphic, rhythmic, spatial and temporal relations between shots. See the section The Relations of Shot to Shot Editing in Bordwell & Thompson for these concepts and for an example of this type of analysis of film style generally.

Film form and film style are explained in the supplementary readings from Film Art by Bordwell & Thompson listed above. Bordwell and Thompson primarily use familiar narrative films such, as The Wizard of Oz, to describe film form. Try not to become stuck on this section (especially don’t become to distracted by the complexities of the ABACA pattern), rather notice, how they draw attention to the peculiar cinematic aspects (rather than plot and dramatisation) that distinguish film from literature and theatre. They also point out that these cinematic aspects can be found in non-narrative and experimental films. By drawing attention to form, rather than content, and the relation of film form to feeling and to different types of meaning Bordwell and Thompson illustrate how form works through similarity and repetition, difference, variation, development, unity and disunity. The chapters on film style cover in detail some of the common structural aspects we first looked at in class including the shot, editing and sound.

Discussion of Structural Approaches

The Research Paper (Assessment 1) requires that you identify, analyse and explain examples of structural and/or dialectical approaches taken by other filmmakers. The Major Project assignment asks you to make a personal film that employs both structural and dialectical approaches and to use the oral presentation to talk in a concise and articulate way about your use of these approaches.  

Refer to the Structural Approaches Lecture Notes and then to Chapters Two and Three of O'Pray, paying particular attention to his discussion of abstract film in the 1920s and the use of abstraction and abstract elements by Richter, Eggeling, Ruttmann, Man Ray and Len Lye. Then, in O'Pray Chapter Five, read his accounts of the attention to visual structure in Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Anger’s Eaux D'Artifice (1953). Now read of Brakhage and Breer’s re-discovery of formal graphic relations with/in the film frame, in Chapter 6 of O'Pray. Having considered the abstract form as one set of structural approaches, re-read chapters Eight and Nine of O'Pray paying close attention to the ideas and techniques discussed in relation to the structural and material aspects of work by Warhol, Snow, Gidal, Le Grice and Kren.

During the 1960s and 1970s, many independent filmmakers in Australia were also exploring structural approaches to filmmaking. Paul Winkler is a pioneer of this kind of work. The Melbourne based distributor Artfilms has been gathering the works of many of Australia's leading independent filmmakers and making their work available on DVD and through streaming. Winkler is also one of our most prolific filmmakers and all his films are in the Museum of Modernn Art in New York. Winkler's first career was as a bricklayer. His film Brick Wall (1975) is a visual meditation on the patterns that the combination of bricks and frames of film can make. There is a structural conection between the subject matter and the media of filmmaking in this work – just as walls are made of many individual bricks, films are made of many individual frames.  Try this link to Brickwall to read about and view the film. It's 20 mins long so if you can get comfortable with a full-screen view have a go at seeing as much as you can manage. You will at least get the idea that watching the whole film can be quite mesmerising. The compressed image of the streamed version looses some of the detail and texture of the original 16mm film and the colours of the bricks in the original were much more brilliant.

From this reading and from viewing some of these films, you will be able to identify films that are conceived and made entirely around a structural idea. In such cases, the ‘content’ (what was recorded) is secondary to the idea or set of patterns created with that content or with the material, structure or production process of the film itself. We can say such films do not have themes or that their theme is some aspect of film form itself. You will also be able to recognise films that incorporate a structural approach together with other thematic content in such a way that the filmmaker uses film form itself as an active, communicative ‘character’ within the work. You will have an opportunity to demonstrate this knowledge through your analysis of film segments in your research presentation. From these examples, you can see that there are a number of ways in which you can incorporate a structural approach to your own creative work through your Assignment 2 project.

In the book chapter "Expanding Creativity" by David Sonnenschein you will find many ideas about how sound is and can be used as a determining element in the form and style of a film. Much of his discussion is about sound as a structural element (even if he doesn’t use that term). And his suggestions to exploring structures and relationships between elements with sound can be applied to many of the other aspects and creative processes in filmmaking – and in other art-forms for that matter. Sonnenschein is a Hollywood-based sound designer and most of his work has been in the mainstream, but notice how interested he is in – and how encouraging he is about the need for – experimentation. You’ll find this particular reading very helpful when it comes to developing ideas for your Assessment 2  project.

Further reading

Refer to the list of recommended texts in the Resources section of the Unit Guide, and in the A1 Individual research subject lists and to the complete Reading Lists for this unit.