INTRODUCTION
Although there are disputes about when to date the beginning of film, one traditional opinion favors . On December of that year, Louis and Auguste Lumière staged the first public screening of a series of their films, including Workers Leaving the Factory, in a room of the Grand Café in Paris. This event had been preceded by a series of pri-vate screenings for selected scientific and business audiences. On De-cember , the public had the opportunity to see the product.
Of course, film had been available to the public prior to this date in the form of kinetoscopes—viewing-boxes into which customers peered one at a time and which have sometimes been referred to as
“peep shows.” The technology for the kinetoscope was developed be-tween and by Thomas Edison and his assistant W. K. L.
Dickson, and the first kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City on April , . Here individual viewers were able to look into the kine-toscope mechanism to see such spectacles as Annie Oakley target shooting. However, the kinetoscope could only accommodate limited audiences, since it involved viewers stationed at individual machines.
The Lumière brothers, in contrast, projected their films—from a single appa-ratus, onto a big screen—thereby allowing large numbers of spectators to enjoy the same film images simultaneously. And this, of course, afforded the Lu-mières a striking economic advantage over the kinetoscope. As a result, film (as we are most familiar with it) became a matter of projection onto a screen and, for that reason, the film showing at the Grand Café in Paris has a special pride of place in film history. One could say that this event was the beginning of film as we now know it, i.e., of film screenings for the public at large. Thus, at this writing, we are now celebrating the th anniversary of film.
The films that the Lumière brothers made were predominantly what we now call documentaries. They were single shots of current affairs, including everyday events, like the arrival of trains and feeding a baby; public events, like military maneuvers—cuirassiers charging at the camera, artillery being unlum-bered; and travelogue footage from exotic locales. Early audiences were en-thralled by the mere impression of movement, as they still are by the action films of our own day. And, one might argue that the tradition of the travelogue is still with us in those mass-market commercial films that search out every cor-ner of the globe for unfamiliar locations (or for familiar locations made ex-otic).1
However, it seems that once the moving image per se lost its novelty, audi-ences craved more than movement to sustain their interest; moving trains and armored cavalry units could hold their attention only so long. Something more by way of content was required.
This problem, one may hypothesize, was solved by film’s turning to fiction and to storytelling as major sources of material. An early, important figure in this regard was Georges Melies. A theatrical magician and the owner of the Theatre Robert-Houdin, Melies was struck by the capacity of film to counter-feit fantastic and supernatural effects—disappearances, metamorphoses, and the like. Melies exploited these special effects in order to stage astounding bits of sleight-of-hand like making hats disappear and reappear in a matter of sec-onds, or transforming an obese man into a skinny one, or “pumping” air into a subject’s head until it “exploded.” Gradually, however, Melies began to inte-grate these magical tricks into narrative frameworks such as fairy tales, like Cin-derella and the Arabian Nights, and science fictions, like Verne’s A Trip to the Moon—which, of course, provided ideal showcases for special effects. Along with camera trickery, narrative fiction became a staple of filmmaking in the early years of the twentieth century.
Between and , the film industry grew and became a major cultural
force. Names like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford were known around the world. At the same time, film technique was refined—
especially in terms of its capacity to narrate—to the extent that it not only en-tranced mass audiences, but also inspired intellectuals, from John Dos Passos and James Joyce to the Soviet Constructivists. A number of the techniques de-veloped during this period—including the use of the close-up, parallel editing, cross-cutting, the master-shot discipline, point-of-view editing, and so on—
became fundamental to narrative film practice, and remain so into our own day.
The name D. W. Griffith is often associated with many of these innovations, and, while it may be controversial to attribute the discovery of all these devices to him, he did do a great deal to popularize their acceptance. His epic, The Birth of a Nation, though undeniably racist, is, in effect, a demonstration of the essential emerging ensemble of devices that constitute what is now often re-ferred to as the classical cinema. This cinema is in evidence daily not only in movie houses worldwide, but on our television screens as well.
During the silent period of filmmaking, which ended roughly in the late nineteen-twenties with the popularization of talking pictures, cinema became an international artform. Films were a means of visual storytelling; indeed, some of its proponents thought of it as a kind of visual Esperanto. It could cross national boundaries with ease; it was a form of international communication.
The introduction of sound-dialogue, of course, presented a problem in this re-spect, but it was one that could be solved by subtitles and dubbing (where dub-bing is an especially attractive technique for addressing large, sometimes illiter-ate audiences). Of course, many contemporary films, especially action films like Waterworld, use dialogue only sparingly, thus making themselves easy to follow even if one is not familiar with the language of the characters.2Someone who does not speak Chinese will not have much trouble understanding a John Woo film from Hong Kong.
American culture was an inevitable beneficiary of the international reach of film, since, given its possession of a major movie industry—what we call Hol-lywood—American culture was exported around the world. This raised com-plaints from other countries, like Britain, as early as the nineteen-twenties.
Critics realized that the movies exported the American way of life and, in con-sequence, nurtured a taste for American products. Those worries continue in the present and can be heard issuing from Paris as well as the Third World.
Needless to say, there have been many formal and technical innovations in film technique since the twenties, including mastery of the deep-focus long
shot for dramatic purposes, on the one hand, and differential screen formats, on the other. But in most cases, I would conjecture, these innovations have eventually been harnessed for the purpose of making film more and more user-friendly for mass audiences both in the United States and abroad. Thus, a film like Jurassic Park was able to garner more than a billion dollars in revenues not only because it dominated the American movie market, but, perhaps more im-portantly, because it captured the international market as well.
In the long run, the TV revolution, the cable revolution, and the VCR revo-lution have served to abet the flourishing of film. For each of these break-throughs in technology and distribution needs something to show its cus-tomers. They all require “software” for their “hardware.” And film—film made for the silver screen—has provided a consistent source of camera fodder.
At one time, films were distributed by means of a staggered release system—
there were first-run houses, second-run houses, and so on. What has happened with the advent of TV, cable, and the VCR is that that system has been recon-stituted in a new key. Initially, films appear in first-run houses and then, per-haps, economy cinemas, and then they go on to further runs on network TV and/or cable, with the local video cassette outlet store functioning as a final venue of theoretically inexhaustible potential. Nowadays, it is harder and harder to lose money on a film in the long run, which, of course, accounts for the dazzling burst of productivity in the film industry over the last decade (in
, the American film industry released titles; in , ).3
Rather than burying film, TV, cable, and the VCR have revivified the indus-try. By the mid-s, merely one decade after the VCR became generally avail-able to private households, sixty million units were already in place around the world.4As is well known, the dissemination of VCRs is frequently cited as a contributory cause of the demise of the Soviet empire. Today, one can travel vir-tually anywhere in the world and find video cassette players. One can visit a general store in Java and see tapes for rental. In , million video cassettes were sold. And, of course, films represent the most sizable proportion of the video cassettes on sale.
In this way, film can be said to constitute one of the most general forms of in-ternational communication. But there is also another sense in which film can lay claim to this title. For whether one is watching a TV program or a feature motion picture, a news program or a kung-fu flick, the formal devices em-ployed—the ensemble of close-shots, point-of-view editing, cross-cutting and the like—are predominantly devices that were perfected historically in the cin-ema. Whether the film is from Hollywood or Hong Kong, or whether the news
clips were assembled in Montreal, Belfast, or Bombay, the techniques that are characteristically deployed to organize visual information into stories, argu-ments, lyrical essays, or commentaries find their relevant historical provenance in film. Thus, film is not only a form of international communication in the sense that films—commercial narrative films—are everywhere, but also in the sense that the techniques of visual communication developed by cinema form the rudiments of visual communication in other media such as TV, video, and, now, even CD-ROM. This mode of visual communication is one of the major discoveries of the twentieth century, and one predicts that it will be influential into the forseeable future.
This much, I think, is not controversial. Film is, for the reasons and in the senses I have adumbrated, a major form of international communication. Per-haps some would even say that it is the major form of international communi-cation. But I see no reason to defend such a strong view. It is enough to point out that, one hundred years since its inception, it is a major form of interna-tional communication. But even this claim raises some questions. For if film is a major form of international communication, then one wants to know what is it about film—or the ensemble of formal and technical devices associated his-torically with film—that makes it suitable to perform this function. What en-ables it to serve the purposes of global communication as expeditiously as it does? Attempting to answer these questions is the topic of the rest of this essay.
IS FILM A LANGUAGE?
Perhaps the astute reader noticed that when speaking of the ensemble of histor-ically cinematic devices—like cross-cutting, close shots, point-of-view editing, and the like—I refrained from calling them the language of film, or the gram-mar of film, or the vocabulary of film. It is quite common to hear talk about film being a language. College textbooks and introductory cinema courses of-ten bear titles such as Introduction to Film Language. By calling film a language, the connection between film and communication can be illuminated at a stroke, since language is first and foremost a mode of communication. Thus, if film is a language and it is an international form of communication, then per-haps we should conjecture that it is an international language.
The notion that film is a language is long-standing. It had already taken root with the silent cinema. One of the leading Soviet filmmaker/theoreticians, V. I.
Pudovkin, for example, argued that “[Film] editing is the language of the film director. Just as in living speech, so one may say in editing: there is a word—the
piece of exposed film, the image; a phrase—the combination of these pieces.”5 But once the thesis is stated so baldly, it is hard to take seriously. For example, what does it mean to regard a shot—Pudovkin’s piece of exposed film—as a word? Shots do not standardly function as words. Typically, they carry an amount of information that it would take sentences and even paragraphs to ex-press in language. Shots, except perhaps in very special situations, are not the equivalent of words, especially if the test of being word-like is that they are summarizable by means of a word. And if that is not the proper test of their be-ing word-like, what would be?
Moreover, the relation of a word to its referent is arbitrary. We use the word
“dog” to denote canines, but it is easy to imagine that we might have intro-duced the word “cat” to do likewise. On the other hand, that a well-made shot of a dog depicts a dog is not arbitrary; a shot of a cat, all things being equal, can-not represent a dog cinematically. The shot of a dog represents a dog, to a large extent, because of a nonarbitrary relation between certain cinematographic processes and certain automatic, human perceptual processes—which I will discuss at greater length below. But, for the moment, suffice it to say that a shot is not a word, nor is it particularly word-like because its relation to its referent is not, on the face of it, word-like in terms of arbitrariness.
I noted that a shot is not a word because it appears to carry more information than a word does. At the very least, it must usually be described by more than one word. Shots do not typically evoke words. If they evoke linguistic responses at all, it is more plausible to predict that they would be descriptions of at least the order of sentences. But it will do no good to attempt to repair Pudovkin’s theory by saying that a shot is not a word, but rather a sentence or a string of sentences.
For cinematic shots are not sentences, nor are they even sentence-like. They are not composed of detachable units like verbs and nouns. They do not have subjects and predicates. They do not have grammatical units at all. A shot is not structurally analogous to a sentence such as “This is a man.” A shot of a person shows all his properties, including his manhood, “all at once” and nondetach-ably, so to speak. In this respect, the shot is more like a painting—say a por-trait—than it is like a sentence.
Sentences are meaningful in virtue of being built up, via recursive opera-tions, from meaningful units, like nouns and verbs. But shots lack comparable discrete building blocks. And as we have seen, the arm of a man in a film shot is not like the word “arm” in a sentence, because the word “arm” bears an arbitrary relation to its referent, whereas the arm in a film image does not bear an
arbi-trary relation to its referent. So, it is not, in other words, a meaningful unit in the way a linguistic unit is. Nor are the elements in a shot added together by means of recursive operations.6
Pudovkin seems to think that film is a combinatory system, just like lan-guage. Shots are assembled by editing the way words are organized into sen-tences. This suggests that he thinks film, or at least film editing, possesses some-thing like a grammar, i.e., recursive rules for determining what is and is not well formed. But film editing possesses no such rules.
Film instructors may talk about rules—such as “Don’t cross the -degree line.” But these are at best rules of thumb, not grammatical rules. The test of whether a stretch of film editing is successful is whether it works—whether it communicates, whether the audience can follow it. For virtually every sup-posed grammatical rule of filmmaking, one can come up with a distinguished counter-example. John Ford, for instance, violates the -degree rule in Stage-coach, and yet the scene in which this occurs is perfectly intelligible to specta-tors. Nor do spectators complain that the scene is not well formed.
In language, we can distinguish between intelligibility and the quality of be-ing well-formed. We can say that we understand a young child’s ungrammati-cal utterances; and we can comprehend messages—like garbled telephone con-versations—that have been partially deleted. Intelligibility is not the test of grammaticality in language. But in film, intelligibility is the whole story.
Moreover, inasmuch as film is an artform, filmmakers need not regard any rule as inviolable. In principle, any of the so-called rules of thumb can be bro-ken, so long as the editing array is successful. Film editing, though it possesses certain tried-and-true strategies, lacks a specifiable syntax, and, therefore, there is no grammar of film in the strict sense of the term, despite the fact that one may find books and articles with titles like A Grammar of the Film.7
And finally, when confronted with an edited array in film—say a shot of one man walking, cut against the shot of another man walking—we infer the mean-ing of the shot chain on the basis of what makes the most sense given the narra-tive context. We do not resort to some rule. In some narranarra-tives, we may infer that the best explanation of the shot chain is that the one man is following the other;
in another narrative, it may make more sense to hypothesize that the two men are walking in different locales. Thus, inasmuch as inference rather than reading is what underwrites editing, editing does not appear to be linguistic.8
It is for reasons such as these that I avoid even metaphors about the language of film and that I think that we have little to learn about the communicative power of cinema by thinking in terms of film as a language. However, many
contemporary film theorists, though they might agree with some of my argu-ments so far, still find the notion of film language—understood in a way that is putatively more sophisticated than Pudovkin’s version of it—viable. The
contemporary film theorists, though they might agree with some of my argu-ments so far, still find the notion of film language—understood in a way that is putatively more sophisticated than Pudovkin’s version of it—viable. The