Film Basics

FILM BASICS:
Learning to “Read” & Write about Film

Most of us have spent countless hours watching movies. Yet too few of us understand the complex, sophisticated artistic and technical means by which filmmakers and their many-personed crews work together to create a film. This online handout is designed to strengthen your "film literacy," and give you concepts and terminology for learning to "read" and write about films.

Meet Some of the Film Crew:

DIRECTOR has overall creative responsibility for turning a screenplay into a visual motion picture. Her main tasks are preparing and positioning actors for a shot; supervising personnel and technical aspects of production (camera positioning, lighting, etc.), and completing post-production (editing, soundtrack, etc.).

WRITER OR SCRIPTWRITER authors the screenplay or script: the written text of a film prepared before production, with dialogue, breakdowns of shots and scenes, descriptions of decor and locations, and specific camera directions.

PRODUCER is responsible for financial and logistical aspects of filmmaking, including budgeting, scheduling, and set construction.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY OR CINEMATOGRAPHER is in charge of setting up the camera and lighting on a shot, and may also be the camera operator.

PRODUCTION DESIGNER coordinates and implements the elements of the film’s visual style--or mise en scene--such as set construction and design, location shots, costumes, decor, the look of the lighting, and the placement/movement of the camera and cast extras: in short, everything that appears before the camera, or the film’s "production values."

EDITOR assembles the individual shots of the film into a visual continuity: the structuring and linking of shots and sequences in a film. Visual "continuity" implies a a smooth movement from image to image to create and maintain the "legibility" or readability, in time and space, of the film action and narrative for the viewer.

SOUND DESIGNER is responsible for the film’s soundtrack: the track on the edge of a film strip that contains dialogue, sound effects, music and narration (voiceover). Synchronous sound is recorded simultaneously with the visual image--synchronized with the image--so sound appears to emanate from the actions on the screen. Sound effects, other than dialogue and music, can be recorded during the production, or added and enhanced in post-production. Music , or the musical portion of the soundtrack, is called the film score, and can be composed for the film, or compiled from existing works by the film’s MUSICAL DIRECTOR.

GAFFER is the chief electrician. GRIP moves the dolly or crane. And this list only begins to name the film crew. Next time those credits roll by at the end of a movie, stop and think how many people it took to make that movie.

How Film Tells Stories

Narrative is story telling. Feature films, usually 100-120 minutes long, are fictional narratives--those that tell fictional stories, or narratives. But how do films tell stories in ways we can understand? Scholars in many fields claim that all human beings seem to tell stories as a way to make sense of human experience. That is, we take the random diverse stuff of everyday experience and turn it into narratives. But even if this narrative impulse is "natural" to human beings, different cultures create distinct and different types of narratives, using different media or forms in which to tell or show their stories. A person from one culture may find the narrative forms of another culture quite incomprehensible. We may acquire the ability to understand our own culture’s ways of telling stories so unconsciously that those narrative forms seem "natural," something we were born knowing. But we are not born knowing how to make sense of film stories, any more than we are born knowing how to read the English language. "Film literacy" is learned, as is the ability to "read" and make sense of film narratives. Films don’t usually call attention to how they are made, or ask viewers to reflect consciously on how we learn to "read" and make sense of film narrative. Yet film has its own semiotics, or a special system of "signs" and techniques for making meaning that film "literates" have learned to "read." Let’s start with film’s basic units of making meaning.

Shot is a single exposure, from a single camera, that records an image on film. The shot is the basic "sign" or unit of the film’s image-meaning system, just as the word is the basic unit of oral and written language.

Sequence is a related group of shots which creates a meaningful narrative unit of film story-telling.

Shot chain is a sequence of separate but related shots which create a unit of narrative meaning. For example, to film a narrative sequence of two persons in conversation, a shot chain known as shot-countershot or shot-reverse shot might be used to show each speaker alternately: that is, the shots shift back and forth between the two people positioned in the same film space to show them talking and responding to each other. Such a filmed sequence helps create a dramatic scene important to telling and understanding the story.

Films tell stories by integrating thousands of shots of many different kinds, from close-up to distant panorama, into sequences of narrative meaning--all of which must carefully planned and ordered, with an effective rhythmic pattern, to create a coherent narrative. Watching a feature film is an inherently temporal experience: it happens over a duration of time, usually 90 to 120 minutes. Yet the events of the story visually represented in film have their own screen time: a temporal illusion of having occurred over a much longer span of time--over many hours, days, or even years. Filmmakers have learned to create, and viewers to accept, such temporal illusions in story-telling. But it is an illusion that must be carefully planned and created. Filmmakers have developed special techniques for signalling such passages of time between sequences and scenes of a story. Our culture’s kind of narrative story telling leads us to expect a certain kind of plot, a sequence of events with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, unfolding over time, to satisfy our notions of what a story is supposed to be. The ordering of film images--arranging shots and sequences in the order they are supposed to have occurred in the story--is important, then, to creating time continuity in the succession of filmed actions and events passing before our eyes. Directors may deliberately depart from the expected forward sequence of fictional events --for example, by inserting a flashback to an earlier time in the fictional story. Such departures may disorient the viewer because they break the viewer’s sense of the film’s time continuity. But film-"literate" viewers, consciously or unconsciously, learn how to "read" and make sense of this film technique: we learn how to interpret the flashback’s time relationship to the "present" time of the main plot, reconstructing it within the created sense of the film’s time continuity.

Film and literature have many parallel narrative elements, techniques, and goals. Since film story telling grew out of literary and oral story telling, and films often base their stories on novels and short stories, it is useful to compare film narrative to the familiar story-telling forms of novels and short stories. Fictional stories can be categorized into genres or types: e.g. detective fiction, murder mystery, comedy, etc. Even if unconsciously, we have learned to recognize the genres of the literary and filmic stories we enjoy--bookshops and video rental stores understand this fact and organize their wares into sections labeled "drama," "horror," "comedy," etc. Familiarity with the narrative genre of a film (e.g. screwball comedy, Westerns, spy thrillers, gothic romances, etc.) and its conventions (the characteristic plots, themes, settings, character types, etc. of that film genre) helps viewers understand and anticipate the film’s narrative development. However, generic expectations may also be upset if a filmmaker chooses to break with a genre’s established conventions, transform the genre drawn upon, and perhaps create something new and unexpected.

Narrative film and narrative literature contain similar elements of fictional story telling, like plot, character, theme, setting, and point of view. However, it is also important to recognize key differences between these verbal (written) and visual (film) media. Film’s dominant mode is presentational--a visual "showing" (rather than a written "telling") of the people, events, state of affairs, settings, conflicts, etc., involved in the story. Any given shot may record an indeterminant number of visual details, and the viewer usually cannot register them all because the film normally goes by our eyes too fast. Plus, the forward-moving pressure of the developing narrative plot engages us spectators in trying to figure out what the narrative sequences and scenes mean to the story, as well as in anticipating what will happen next. The viewer’s attention must be directed and focused, often by visual techniques unique to film, to ensure that elements important to the story’s meaning do not pass before our eyes literally unnoticed. Some of these techniques, such as the close up, we have learned to expect and "read" as "natural" to film story-telling and meaning-making. We may not be as conscious of other sophisticated filmic techniques used to register and emphasize important story elements of narrative film. However, when filmmakers depart from these "naturalized" methods of film narrative, we probably do experience these departures as something different or amiss--even if we can’t explain why.

Character, Point of View, and the Implied Narrator

Film, unlike novels and short stories, develops its characters by literal "showing." Narrative point of view--the mind’s eye and mental perspective from which a story and its characters are understood-- takes on not only a mental but a new literal meaning in film. Inevitable to the film medium is constant presentation of a visual point of view: the viewer "sees" only through the camera’s "eye." The camera eye controls quite literally what the viewer is allowed to see and notice visually onscreen, directing the film viewer’s attention and creating anticipation beyond the present shot before us. Often the visual vantage point is identified with one or more characters in the movie. And as viewers "see" through the characters’ eyes, so too may we adopt their mental, as well as visual points of view.

Point of view shot represents the viewpoint of a character in the film, showing what that character is looking at, or representing a character’s physical or psychological state (e.g. a blurred or tilted image representing what a drunken character is seeing). Point of view shot is often associated with shot-countershot or shot-reverse shot.

For example, the shot chain may go like this:

Shot #1 shows the character visibly attending to something outside the frame (what we viewers can see actually depicted onscreen at this film moment);

Shot #2 (point of view shot) reveals what the character is looking at;

Shot #3 returns to the character to record her/his reaction to what is seen.

“Interest” point of view describes the empathetic process whereby the viewer literally "sees," and is invited to think and feel, from a particular character’s point of view via the controlling camera’s eye. This empathy is created through point of view shots from the character’s physical angle of vision viewing what that character sees from the same approximate distance the character would be seeing whatever is being looked at in the point of view shot. The camera can move in on the object viewed to emphasize what the character is focusing on or noticing as significant in the object being viewed.

Reaction editing renders a particular character’s appeal, menace, interest, etc., through recording other characters’ reactions to that character. Reaction shots and sequences, then, are an important means of indirect description of a particular character in whom the filmmaker wants to interest us.

Voice-over (abbreviated in screenplays as “V. O.”) is narration or dialogue, coming from a time or space other than that of the screen image directly before the viewer. Voice-over may explain what is not shown, or comment on what is only implied by onscreen action, setting, character. Voice-over dialogue may be the recognizable voice of one of the characters; voice-over has been used, for example, as the cinematic equivalent of the soliloquy, a playwright’s technique of allowing theater goers to "overhear" a stage character’s "thoughts" spoken aloud, but according to the theatrical convention, other characters cannot hear the soliloquy. Film critics may disparage voice-over narration as means of explaining character or plot, citing the aesthetic principle of co-expressibility: that is, some film critics argue that in the best filmmaking, no more should be expressed or explained verbally (e.g. in voice-over) than can be shown or implied visually on film.

Cinematic means of presenting characterization, or presenting and developing character, can be both direct and indirect. Direct methods of characterization encompass what we actually get to see and hear onscreen: visual appearances, dialogue, action and interaction among characters, flashbacks which render the past history of a character, dream sequences that give us visual revelations of a character’s inner life, etc. In film fiction as in literary fiction, character can also be developed indirectly--through what is only implied or by what is omitted from the onscreen presentation. A film performance, then, may be elusive regarding many aspects of a character’s emotions, thoughts, past history, etc. Or the film narrative may be presented with significant gaps in the story’s past or present action--that viewers are expected to fill in, infer, puzzle out, and interpret. For example, The Piano refuses to "show" or "tell" viewers much about the main character’s past history, and several significant dramatic questions are raised but never fully answered by the film--such as why Ada doesn’t speak, and who Flora’s father exactly was. The more such "palpable absences" a filmmaker leaves in characterization or plot, the more "active" the viewers have to be in interpreting the characters’ motives and actions, and in co-creating the meaning of the story.

However, many shots and sequences are not filmically identified with any character in the movie (e.g. through point of view shots or reaction shot sequences. That is, many shots and narrative sequences are offered from visual vantage outside of or are detached from specific characters’ points of view. The accumulating totality of all these other visual vantage points may be taken to represent the filmmaker’s visual "eye," and imply a story-teller’s consciousness that organizes the story telling and shapes its meaning, infusing the story’s meaning with values and attitudes. It is well to remember that stories always come to us "mediated" by a narrator--a story teller--or a narrative consciousness that constantly decides and filters what we read, hear, see. Filmmakers, and/or their screenwriters, may invent a narrator to tell the story, just as they invent character roles and cast actors to act the story out. As in literary fiction, the created narrator may be directly involved in the world of the story, may even be one of the characters participating in the plot action. As often, the narrator of a novel or short story may be implied, rather than coming from an identifiable character who acts as narrator. This implied narrator seems like a "disembodied voice" detached from the characters and coming from somewhere outside the story.

Feature film narratives also have such story-tellers--literally the camera "eye" which controls our "gaze," and thus constantly mediates the viewers’ visual access to the story. We, the spectators, experience the implied narrator or narrative perspective as the "disembodied eye" of the camera not only controlling what we see, but shaping how we see and make sense of the film story unrolling before us. To be accurate, film narratives are visually presented from multiple points of view of the shifting camera "eye." That is, there are usually many cameras, shooting thousands of different shots from many different angles of vision, engaged in cinematic story telling. It is well to remember these technological conditions of feature film story telling, very challenging conditions when we consider the director’s responsibility for coordinating and unifying these multiplying points of view, as well as the director’s other tasks (mentioned earlier), to create a coherent visual presentation and a meaningful feature film narrative.

Some Other Elements of Film-making

Cinematic Space, or Filmic Space is the illusionary world created on the screen through an (edited) sequence of shots, which create the film’s screen time (as opposed to the actual duration of events experienced in life) and its own spatial relationships. The narrative thrust of continuously forward moving pictures, and the dramatic import of the unfolding film story depend upon the fimmaker’s creation of believable cinematic space to immerse the viewer imaginatively and perceptually in the film’s time-space illusion, and thus in the film narrative.

The successive accumulation and visual consistency of film sequences and scenes create the viewer’s sense of continuity in time and space. Filmmakers must manage temporal and spatial breaks carefully, as well as other devices of film story telling, to make them all work together to move the story forward and create a coherent and believable viewing experience. Careful planning before starting to shoot a film, as well as creative problem-solving during and afterwards, are essential to successful filmmaking.

Visual continuity is created through careful planning of shot sequences and their ordering, camera locations and angles, as well as many other spatial elements of film-making. Unlike novelists, filmmakers must attend to the visual continuity of a narrative film to create a coherent experience for viewers. We make sense of what we see in "normal" life by interpreting the spatial dimensions (e.g. size, volume) and spatial relationships (e.g. distance from the viewer and from other objects viewed) of the objects we see. We learn a kind of spatial "logic" for interpreting such spatial dimensions and relationships (e.g. the logic of depth perception interprets an object that is very distinct, bigger in size, brighter in color as closer to the viewer, than another object perceived as smaller, duller, less distinct, and perhaps partially covered up by the first object). And we become disoriented and confused when the "rules" of this spatial logic we have learned are broken. Because film is a visual medium, its images must be planned, filmed and edited in such a way as to create visual continuity--or satisfy the viewers’ spatial "logic," governing how we see and make sense of the dimensions and relationships of things, locations, people, and events as they are perceived in space. Visual continuity doesn’t just "naturally" happen in filmmaking or film viewing; it is an spatial illusion that must be carefully planned and created--no small feat remembering that filmmakers generally use several cameras, which film thousands of shots from many different angles and distances, of many different places, people, things, under constantly changing natural and artificial conditions (e.g., of lighting, weather, time of day or night).

Storyboards (a series of drawings) and other planning techniques are used to project and maintain a film’s visual continuity. Planning and shooting a film must anticipate post-production editing, through which visual continuity, narrative progression, and meaning are realized for the viewer.

Camera distance from what is being filmed is important to establishing spatial relationships among actors, action, setting, etc, as well as between viewers and these film images. For example, so we can make spatial sense of what we’re viewing, the opening shot of a scene is often an extreme long shot (from a great distance)--called an establishing shot--to establish the location and convey the spatial dimensions of a setting. This shot may be an aerial shot taken from the air (from an airplane, helicopter, camera operator in a parachute, or a camera mounted on a crane)--which would also be a high angle shot (shot from above). A shot that orients us spatially to a scene is called the master shot: it is framed and focused to take in the complete space and action of a scene. Later during the editing process, it will become part of an edited sequence of different kind of shots (e.g., close-ups, shot--countershot combinations), merged to create visual continuity and narrative sense.

Set refers to the space constructed, or found and perhaps altered for shooting the film. Filming on location means filming away from the studio lot. In screenplays, abbreviations like "int" (interior, or indoor set) and "ext" (exterior, or outdoor set) may be accompanied by set descriptions, as well as other directions regarding shot set-ups.

Shot set-ups involve positioning the camera(s), determining camera angles and lighting, positioning the actors, etc., within the set. Blocking positions the actors and plans their movements within a scene.

Camera angles may imitate a "normative" angle of vision, or they can be high angle, low angle, tilted, wide-angle (producing a wider field of vision than is standard).

Framing is camera placement, in relation to actors and objects, to determine what will be included in the image frame, and what will be excluded or left outside the image frame. Note that off-screen space and sound, action (space) occurring outside the visual range of a frame image, and sound without a visual source within the frame but assumed to be related to action occurring outside the frame image, can be important to both the narrative and cinematic space.

Lighting refers to the illumination of a camera subject being filmed. Lighting may be natural or artificial, very bright (high key lighting) or dark (low key lighting). Fill light may be used to supplement other lighting on parts of the scene that the key light doesn’t cover. Backlighting lights the subject from behind, creating a halo or silhouette effect while leaving the face in shadow.

Color is a property of light and changes perceptually with changes in light and surroundings (color interacts with other colors near it). Color has an inherent ability to create visual interest and emotional effects. "Natural" color may be used: color in objects as perceived in ordinary daylight. But film color can be altered through lighting and tinting (e.g., bathing film footage in color dyes to achieve special color effects), or through use of filters (a glass or gelatin material fitted over the camera lens to alter the light passing through on to the film).

Color is designed--in sets, costumes, make-up, lighting, etc. Color’s properties of hue, value (lightness and darkness of hues), intensities, juxtaposition and contrast, "advancing" (warm colors) or "receding" (cool colors), to visually balance, create visual harmony or discord, emphasize a particular person or object, or achieve dominant tonality of a single color (despite the presence of other variant colors).

Focus is the standard for sharp definition of an image. Parts of all of the film image may be deliberately blurred, left out of focus. Soft focus reduces the sharpness of an image by manipulating the lens or inserting gauze between the lens and the photographed object. Part of the image may be darkened--iris--to reshape the frame and highlight one part of it.

Depth of field describes the distance from the camera that remains in focus in a shot. Deep space is the distant portion of the visual field, farthest from the camera, when it remains in focus and is used as part of the mise-en-scene (see below).

Deep focus keeps the entire image in sharp focus, no matter how far from the camera; it permits a mise-en-scene in which action can occur at different distances and remain in sharp focus.

Mise-en-scene, a French term ("placing on the stage") adapted from the theater, refers to the totality of the film’s visual style: all the visual elements of the film image. The term encompasses placement and movement of cameras and performers--the way the camera is used to compose, the way actions are staged--as well as decor, lighting, color tints, setting, costume, make-up, props, proxemic relationships (e.g., how actors are positioned in relation to each other). In other words, all the visual elements of the film image. Mise-en-scene emphasizes the content, effect and meaning in visual images themselves (rather than, say, the way shots and sequences are merged together through editing--see below).

Camera Movement and Film Speed are also planned to create visual interest, emphasis, continuity, etc. Cameras may shoot from a fixed, static location. But often camera will pan (usually horizontal movement, but can be vertical) across a setting or scene. Smooth (rather than jerky) camera movement is achieved in pans and tracking shots by mounting the camera on tracks or rails, or on a dolly (a wheeled movable vehicle on which camera and operator are mounted). Hand-held camera may be preferred for a less smooth and polished recording of action and movement: if a less steady, even jerky sensation is desirable to suggest dynamic action, immediacy, or authenticity. Most of us are already familiar with film speed variations like slow motion or fast motion shots (produced either by filming fewer or more feet of film per second, or by speeding or slowing the rate of advance of projection). Freeze frame is achieved by reprinting an individual film frame many times on the celluloid strip of film so that when projected it appears as a still image. Stop-motion photography stops the camera to make a change in the scene being photographed (e.g., to make it appear that a character has magically disappeared, a kind of special effect).

Editors, who cut and reconstruct film fragments, must attend to factors such as the direction of movement, volumes of shapes, intensity of light, distances, color, and emotional content in the fragments in order to create visual emphasis (directing the viewer’s attention to important parts of film images and story), the desired effects of contrast and conflict, juxtapositioning, building and addition, and visual continuity in the multi-image whole produced through editing.

Take is the act of photographing a single shot; in filming takes are frequently repeated and consecutively numbered, and the most effective ones are selected by the director and editor in post-production editing. Out-takes refer to what is cut out and ends up "on the cutting room floor." The same scene may be shot in several different takes by different cameras from different positionings, different camera angles, etc.--later to be "analytically edited" (see below) and reconstructed in post-production.

Sequence shot refers to a long take, or an unbroken shot lasting longer than usual, involving changes of position by actors and/or camera that would otherwise be filmed in separate shot set-ups.

Cut stops the photographing of a shot or is a direct change of shot within a film.

Juxtaposition--the placement of images next to other images--is a significant way to create film meaning or suggest parallels/contrasts. Sometimes images communicate less in themselves than by their juxtaposition, or placement next to other images

Insert shots, usually close-ups, emphasize one segment of a larger scene.

Intercutting means to interweave scenes or sequences from separate times or locations in a film’s continuity. Cross cutting alternates shots from different locations, as when a series of shots cuts back and forth between two or more separate spaces--usually with a direct narrative link between events, which may be understood to be happening simultaneously.

Jump cut is a cut that breaks time continuity in a scene by leaving a gap in time.

Editing (or Montage, the French term for editing) concerns the deliberate placement of separate shots and sequences in relation to each other. Shots and sequences are rarely filmed in the order we see them on the screen. In the largest sense, editing refers to the construction of the film as whole after shooting takes place. Pieces of film are cut, recombined, and joined in the laboratory, integrating optical devices like fades and dissolves as transitions between sequences and scenes.

Analytical editing refers to the process whereby (1) an action or series of actions, involving separate camera set-ups and separate shots, are shot one after another in continuous movement of the film without interruption; (2) but these shots and/ or sequences are afterwards "analyzed" or broken up into a series of discrete images; and (3) then the individual fragments are reconstructed in editing into a multi-imaged whole to create a cinematic viewing experience that serves the film’s narrative illusion and continuity of time and space.

Dissolve is a transition from one shot to another: fade out to a blank or black screen, followed by a fade in to a new shot; or lap dissolve in which one shot fades (a gradual change in light) while the next shot gradually becomes visible, signalling the end of one scene and beginning of the next.

Sound and Music, though often given less attention than the visual dimension of film, are important to the viewer’s ability to follow the narrative line and make sense of the story. The voice--or phonogenic qualities--of the actors may resonate as powerfully as their images--or their photogenic qualities--in creating their cinematic personalities and dramatic-narrative functions. Music can create the expressive, emotional mood of a scene. Mixing refers to the recording and editing of sound. The sound mixer is the person on the set who records dialogue during filming. The film’s master soundtrack, produced by the final sound edit, is the process of mixing dialogue, music, and sound effects in post-production.

The “Rhetoric” and Ethics of Film

Fiction is make-believe (the unsympathetic may call fiction a "lie"), a sophisticated form of imaginative "playing." Most fiction-makers, whether working in the medium of the novel, short story, theater, or film, want the viewer to participate imaginatively in their stories, want viewers to identify with and care about their characters and actions, want to persuade the audience to "suspend disbelief" and pretend--at least temporarily--that these fictional stories are "real." Thus, we can also think of film fiction as having its own form of "rhetoric"--a unique power to persuade viewers to "suspend their disbelief" in the film story. "Seeing is believing," as the saying goes in our culture. Therefore, cinema, a visual medium, has some definite advantages over literature (made of words, not images), for example, in being able to present physical descriptions of settings and characters visually. We literally see on film what the story teller wants us to see. Furthermore, strong illusions of movement and of the passage of time are created by the constantly "moving pictures," directing the viewer’s attention ever forward with the momentum of the story. But these "moving pictures" speed by too quickly for the viewer to perceive them as--and remember that they are--a succession of essentially static images. The rhetorical techniques of film--its potential to persuade audiences to accept its "realistic illusion"--can be applied very skillfully by great filmmakers, or unskillfully by bad ones--as can the "rhetoric" of any other medium.

But many film critics are concerned not only with the artistry, but also the ethics of filmmaking. Ethical concerns have been raised because of film’s uniquely persuasive powers to "immerse" us in a world of illusion and make us "believe" what we "see." Commentators have pointed out that film has a compelling "reality" effect--a photorealistic illusion of visual actuality (though built of depth and perception distortions) which viewers tend to accept as "reality" itself. Sophisticated film technology, and especially editing, can manipulate film images artificially, yet this artifice is made to seem "natural" and "real" to viewers. Film produces very real-seeming dramatic effects, creates narrative continuity artificially, and "controls" point of view. Yet editing tends to cover the traces of its own manipulations, and unreflecting film viewers unconsciously learn to accept editing’s artificial conventions and interventions as "natural" and "real." Film’s power to blur distinctions between reality and fiction causes understandable concern about its impact on children. Yet psychoanalytic film critics, for example, are just as concerned about its impact on adults. These critics have analyzed the conditions of traditional movie house spectatorship, which induce a passive dream state of anonymous, private voyeurism. The viewer in a darkened movie theater sees without being seen, free to fantasize and project his desires without responsibility or inhibitions. Filmmakers control this voyeur-viewer’s "gaze," and films can encourage viewers to indulge in their narcissistic desires, evoke and channel fantasies in unsavory directions. Film’s persuasive power to immerse us in fictional worlds is the subject of much lively critical debate.

When readers and viewers speak of "losing" themselves in a story, "escaping" or "forgetting" themselves and the "real world" they "normally" inhabit, they are testifying to the power that fiction can exercise over the imagination. But do we ever really forget a feature film is "only a story," a fiction? Perhaps so, perhaps not. Television, film, and videotapes are ubiquitous in our society; generations now grow up on them. Some critics argue that even children learn the "conventions" of film viewing early, become sophisticated viewers at increasingly younger ages, and are not so easily duped by the "reality effect" of film fiction. Film that marks itself as "fiction" is not the problem, these critics argue. Rather the ethical problem and dishonesty reside in film that claims it represents unmediated "reality"--e.g. television news, documentary, and "nonfiction" TV shows that use the same sophisticated technology and manipulative editing techniques of fictional film. Film is rarely an unmediated "window on the world" unreeling before us, nor can we assume it offers simple, accurate images of reality. Perhaps we can no longer afford to be unreflecting "film illiterates." For film’s inherent "reality effect," its technology, editing techniques, and other capabilities to artificially manipulate yet produce irresistibly "real-seeming" image and sound, have become very sophisticated indeed. Fortunately, these developments have also allowed filmmakers to create cinematic art of a very high order.

Adapted from these Sources:

Lauer, David A., and Stephen Pentak. Design Basics. 4th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College, 1995.

Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Sklar, Robert. Film: An International History of the Medium. New York: Prentice-Hall- Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

See Also Smooth Talk, for sources on the film adaptation of
Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

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