Notes from “Looking at Film: An introduction to film” 2nd Edition by Richard Barsam
Let’s compare a surveillance tape to a film. “A surveillance tape is constant and unchanging: the tape artlessly records (a limited) reality from a fixed point of view and with chronological continuity. The meaning of the surveillance tape, to the extent that is has a meaning, is almost completely determined by what is recorded on video rather than by how it looks as we watch it.” However, in a film our understanding is continually influenced and adjusted by its deliberately crafted form. All the details that contribute to a film’s look and feel—clothing, set design, blocking, acting, camera movement, editing, musical accompaniment, and other technical elements—together constitute the film’s form and are important to our sense of the film’s meaning. The form of a film is manipulated to shape and influence how the audience views the content.
Content can be seen as the subject of an artwork and form as the means through which that subject is expressed. The content that a surveillance tape and a film may show us may be the same, but the forms in which they are show can be entirely different, as explained previously. If we were to isolate content alone from a film telling a true life story, then we would be concerned with completeness, accuracy and reliability. But by looking at content alone in a film “we risk overlooking the aspects that make movies unique as an art form and interesting as individual works of art.”
Let’s compare a surveillance tape to a film. “A surveillance tape is constant and unchanging: the tape artlessly records (a limited) reality from a fixed point of view and with chronological continuity. The meaning of the surveillance tape, to the extent that is has a meaning, is almost completely determined by what is recorded on video rather than by how it looks as we watch it.” However, in a film our understanding is continually influenced and adjusted by its deliberately crafted form. All the details that contribute to a film’s look and feel—clothing, set design, blocking, acting, camera movement, editing, musical accompaniment, and other technical elements—together constitute the film’s form and are important to our sense of the film’s meaning. The form of a film is manipulated to shape and influence how the audience views the content.
Content can be seen as the subject of an artwork and form as the means through which that subject is expressed. The content that a surveillance tape and a film may show us may be the same, but the forms in which they are show can be entirely different, as explained previously. If we were to isolate content alone from a film telling a true life story, then we would be concerned with completeness, accuracy and reliability. But by looking at content alone in a film “we risk overlooking the aspects that make movies unique as an art form and interesting as individual works of art.”
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