Film Form

Film Art - Chapter 2: The Significance of Film Form

• Filmmakers must decide how to start their movies to engage the audience effectively. Two common strategies include:

  • Hard Openings: Begin with an intense or dramatic moment to immediately capture attention.

  • Soft Openings: Gradually immerse the audience into the story, allowing them to absorb the world and characters at a slower pace.

• Both hard and soft openings are effective but set different expectations for the viewer.

• The choice of opening influences how audiences engage with the film’s themes and structure.

• Screenwriters and directors make intentional choices to shape audience reactions.

The Concept of Form in Film

• Form refers to how different elements within a film work together to create meaning and emotional responses.

• Filmmakers structure their work to shape audience experience, guiding attention and engagement.

• Form is integral to storytelling and stylistic elements, not separate from them.

Form as Pattern

• Form = in it’s broadest sense, the overall set of relationships among a film’s parts

• Films create patterns that audiences recognise and anticipate.

• Patterns can be found in:

  • Narrative Structure: How events unfold and relate to each other.

  • Stylistic Elements: Camera movements, colour schemes, music, and editing techniques.

• Audiences naturally look for connections

Form Versus Content

• People often think of form as separate from content (i.e., form is just a container for content).

• However, form actively shapes content and audience perception.

Formal Expectations

• Film form generates expectations by setting up patterns that guide audience anticipation.

• Filmmakers manipulate expectations by either fulfilling, delaying, or subverting them.

• Advertisements, titles, and trailers also establish expectations before viewing.

Conventions and Experience

• The first scenes of a film often explain background information about characters and action, a convention in storytelling.

• Genres use conventions heavily, for example, action movies often feature car crashes or spectacular stunts, and musicals feature characters singing and dancing.

• Filmmakers rely on conventions to meet audience expectations but also innovate within or break these conventions to create fresh experiences.

• Audience Expectations and Artistic Form

  • Audiences rely on their prior life and artistic experiences to engage with films.

  • There is a separation between everyday life and artistic conventions.

• Evolution of Conventions

  • Conventions can change over time. For instance, flashbacks were once considered rare but have become commonplace in contemporary films.

  • Some directors have created films with unconventional pacing or structure, like Béla Tarr's Satan's Tango, which challenges the fast-paced expectations of Hollywood films.

Form and Feeling

• The form of a film shapes how the audience responds emotionally.

• Form also creates expectation and emotion. Suspense can build anxiety, while gratified expectations may provide relief.

• Filmmakers create films to convey meaning, which the audience interprets based on the formal elements of the film.

• Filmmakers might present referential, explicit, or implicit meanings through their work.

• Types of Meaning

  1. Referential Meaning:

     • Concrete meanings that relate to real-world references. For example, The Wizard of Oz refers to the Depression era and life on a Kansas farm.

  2. Explicit Meaning:

     • Clear, openly stated messages in the film. For example, Dorothy’s line, "There’s no place like home," sums up the film’s lesson about the importance of home.

  3. Implicit Meaning:

     • More abstract meanings that suggest a deeper theme, such as the passage from childhood to adulthood in The Wizard of Oz.

• Interpretations of films can vary widely. For instance, The Wizard of Oz could be interpreted as a story about adolescence, courage, or the conflict between childhood and adulthood.

• The meaning in a film is often derived from the relationships between the film's formal elements (e.g., narrative and style).

  • In The Wizard of Oz, the Yellow Brick Road’s meaning is shaped by its narrative function, colour scheme, and music, contributing to the overall meaning of the film.

Evaluation: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

• People frequently evaluate films, offering judgments about their quality.

• Personal Taste vs. Evaluative Judgment

  • Personal taste, such as saying “I liked this film” or “I hated it,” differs from evaluative judgment like saying, “It’s a good film” or “It’s wretched.”

  • Viewers often have a range of preferences; for example, some people enjoy films that are considered bad by critics (e.g., “guilty pleasures”).

• Evaluations can be made using specific criteria rather than relying solely on personal taste.

• Criteria are standards used to judge films objectively and compare their relative quality.

• Types of Evaluation Criteria

  1. Realistic Criteria

     • Some people assess films based on how realistic they are.

     • However, realism isn’t always an applicable criterion, as many films break the rules of reality (e.g., romantic comedies often feature unrealistic coincidences).

  2. Moral Criteria

     • Films can be evaluated based on moral considerations, such as their depiction of nudity, profanity, or violence.

     • Some viewers might condemn these elements, while others may defend them as realistic in context.

     • Broadly, moral criteria can also judge a film's overall significance, including its view on life, emotional range, or ability to show different perspectives.

  3. Artistic Criteria

     • Artistic evaluation focuses on assessing films as cohesive, emotionally engaging works. This includes:

       • Coherence: Films that maintain unity in their form are valued for this consistency.

       • Intensity of Effect: Films that are vivid and emotionally engaging tend to be regarded more highly.

  4. Complexity

     • Complexity in films can indicate quality. Complex films engage audiences on multiple levels and offer rich, layered meanings.

  5. Originality

     • Originality is a significant criterion when evaluating films, although it should not be valued for its own sake. A film that takes familiar conventions and uses them innovatively can be considered good aesthetically.

• Weighing Criteria involves:

  • Degree and Balance

    • Evaluation criteria are matters of degree. One film may be more complex than another, but other criteria like coherence or intensity might be lacking.

    • There is often a balance between criteria.

    • For example, a film may be original but lack complexity or coherence, or a slasher film may be intense but unoriginal or poorly organised.

• Purpose of Evaluation is usually:

  • Personal Taste vs. Objective Evaluation

    • Sharing personal preferences can be fun, but objective evaluation helps us better understand how films work and their artistic significance.

    • A deep, objective evaluation often helps uncover overlooked aspects of a film or offers new perspectives on widely accepted classics.

  • Close Examination of the Film

    • General statements about a film's quality, like calling The Wizard of Oz a "masterpiece," are less informative.

    • A more productive evaluation would point to specific aspects of the film, such as its coherence or symbolic connections, to explain its value.

  • Evaluation and Formal Analysis

    • Just like interpretation, evaluation is most effective when it is backed by formal analysis.

    • This helps us understand the connections and qualities we may have missed.

Principles of Film Form

• Form in film does not equal formula.

• While science has definitive laws, in the arts, including film, there are no strict rules that all artists must follow. Filmmakers create within cultural conventions, and while no two films must follow the same rules, certain broad principles of form are often utilised.

Function

• Elements Fulfill Purposes

  • Every element in a film serves a function in the larger narrative. The key question is not “How did this element get there?” but “What is this element doing there?” and “How does it guide the audience’s response?”

• Motivation

  • Motivation is about asking why something is in the film and justifying the presence of any element.

  • It can be applied to characters, actions, or even the setting.

    • For example, if a character is dressed oddly in a formal setting, we ask why. Is it motivated by the character’s backstory or the plot?

  • Directors and cinematographers make decisions to motivate camera movements, lighting choices, and other elements based on character actions or plot needs.

    • For instance, chiaroscuro lighting might be used without a clear motivation, but it can be designed to create a particular mood.

Similarity and Repetition

• Repetition as a Structural Tool

  • Similarity and repetition are vital to creating formal patterns in a film.

  • These principles help establish expectations and build a cohesive structure.

  • Key elements like character appearances, themes, and motifs often reappear throughout the film.

    • Example – Character Repetition: The main character should appear consistently to be recognised as central to the plot. Also, dialogue often reiterates key themes or conflicts.

• Motifs

  • A motif is a repeated significant element (object, sound, place, etc.) that contributes to the film’s form.

    • For instance, in Guardians of the Galaxy, the song “O-O-H Child” is a motif that recalls Peter’s connection to his mother.

• Parallels

  • Parallels involve comparing elements across the narrative to highlight similarities.

    • For example, in The Wizard of Oz, the Kansas farmhands have counterparts in Oz, like the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, which creates parallel relationships between characters in both the real and fantasy worlds.

Difference and Variation

• A filmmaker cannot rely solely on repetition, as it can become monotonous.

• Variation, even in small doses, is key to sustaining interest and engagement.

• Variation can be shown through:

  • Filming in different styles to underscore the emotional significance of the moment

  • Character conflict to drive the narrative and engage the viewer through dramatic tension

  • Use of settings, costumes, colours

  • Voice quality

  • Musical motifs

• Repetition and variation work together to create the film’s form.

• Noticing one element leads to noticing the other, and understanding both is key to understanding the film’s structure.

Development

• Development refers to how a film progresses by alternating between repetition and differences.

• This creates a pattern that moves the narrative forward and provides structure.

• Types of Development:

  • Journeys (Wizard of Oz, LoTR)

  • Searching for something (meaning, characters, etc)

  • Psychological development

• Filmmakers often break down a film into parts to map its development.

• A segmentation is a written outline that divides a film into its major and minor sections, helping to illustrate its overall progression.

• This process helps viewers understand how the parts contribute to the whole.

  • Example: By segmenting a film like The Wizard of Oz, we can see how each part contributes to the development of the film's themes, such as the journey, the search for home, and the mystery surrounding the Wizard.

• A key way to understand a film’s development is by comparing its beginning and ending.

  • In The Wizard of Oz, the final scene mirrors the opening scene, reinforcing the film’s cyclical structure and its themes of home and belonging.

Unity and Disunity

• A film achieves unity when its elements are seamlessly interwoven to create a cohesive, complete narrative.

• In a unified film, every part has a function, and the similarities and differences between elements contribute to the overall structure.

• Perfect unity is rare in films.

  • Pulp Fiction also contains moments of disunity, such as the unexplained contents of the briefcase. This lack of closure contributes to the film’s theme of mystery and the characters' obsession with material value.

  • The film’s disunities serve larger thematic purposes, highlighting the importance of character reactions rather than the mystery itself.

• Disunities are not necessarily a flaw; they can enhance the film’s themes.

• Moments of disunity add complexity, leaving space for interpretation and emphasising key narrative elements.

Lecture

• Form and content isn’t easily divisible — it’s not really what something’s about, it’s the how and why thats important

Elements of Film Form

• Style

  • mise-en-scene

  • cinematography

  • editing

  • sound

• Structure

• Genre

• Pattern

• Narrative

Expectations and Experience

• Our experiences of artworks are framed by our expectations of them

• Our expectations are influence by films we’ve seen before (prior experience), narrative conventions, and genre expectations

Playing with Our Expectations

• Playing around with expectations leads to audience experience, thus creates emotion

• Expectations are usually differed by delaying fulfilment or going in a different direction, causing suspense or surprise

Meaning and Interpretation

• If the filmmaker intends the film to be about something, it must communicate this through its formal properties — these are what we must pay attention to

• The complexity of the film as an artwork (audiovisual moving pictures) means that its meaning will inevitably be similarly complex, multiple, and even contradictory at times

  • contradiction and multiple is common and okay — we’re humans, we contradict ourselves or give things many different meanings

• We need to stay openminded as we engage in any analysis of a film, so we can see what we need to

Film Analysis — How to Pay Attention To Films

• Careful attention

• Multiple viewings

• Perceiving the film with an open mind

• Noticing the formal and stylistic features

• How do particular things make you feel? How do they prompt you to think? What reactions do you find yourself having?

• Paying attention to patterns and contrast

• You may want to hold off on interpretation until the end fo the film

Principles of Film Form

1. Function = what is this element doing there? How does it cue us to respond?

2. Similarity and Repetition = are elements and patterns repeated? If so, how and when?

3. Difference and Variation = how are elements contrasted and differentiated from one another?

4. Development = what principles of progression or development are at work through the form of the film?

5. Unity and Disunity = what degree of unity is present in the film’s overall form?

Parasite

• ki-woo

Director

• Bong Joon-Ho

  • Okja (2017), Parasite (2019), Mickey 17 (2025)

• Uses global genres to tell often very local Korean stories

• Thematic focus on inequality and the class structure, implicit critique of capitalism

• Focus on relations between humans and non-humans

Function

• Ki-woo’s interview

  • Points out how the family live very much lower down, in a sort of basement apartment, whereas the family Ki-woo will go tutor for lives up a steep hill = metaphor for being at the bottom of the class structure

  • Clutter, openness, and chaos in their home which contrasts with the minimalism, a lack of people, cleanness in the upper class neighbourhood, as well as a sense of boundaries in that it’s walled off

  • The clean white of the resume/application, contrasting with the shadows and grime of the house, may symbolise this ticket to the upper class neighbourhood. As soon as he gets into the neighbourhood, it fades into the background because it belongs there

• Set design =

  • hills, character must move upwards, the family home is underground — serves to both illustrate the reality of living for the poor in South Korea and to emphasise the class difference between the Kim family and Park family.

  • the Park family are physically and metaphorically high above the Kim family

  • the Park family house is breezy, airy, minimal — lots of greenery and open spaces, lots of sunlight, highlights their wealth and freedom

• Camera movement and low angle shot

  • tracking shot following Ki-woo up the hill emphasises the height of the hill, underscoring the distance between the two families

  • even the lens flare emphasises brightness

• Soundscape

  • city sounds vs the swaying of leaves in the breeze

• Scholar’s Rock

  • false hope and cyclical poverty = functions as an ironic symbol of upward mobility, initially signifying fortune, but ultimately brings their destructioj as it gets used a weapon in the climax

• The flood

  • juxtaposed against the Park’s unaffected privilege (who sleep through the storm) as the flood exposes their vulnerability

  • Ki-taek clutching the floating toilet emphasises their degrading circumstances

• All of these stylistic features function to emphasise the differences between the Kim family and the Park family — which coheres with the narrative of the film

Similarity and Repetition

• Opening & Closing Scene

  • same place, same low shot — repetition

• Staircases and doors

  • ascending and descending throughout the film, representing the social & capitalist ladder

  • vertical movement of stairs highlights dynamics — park’s grandeur vs kim’s bunker’s depths

  • doors symbolising new opportunities, doorways to new classes and lives

  • during the Kim family’s infiltration into the rich Park household, the Kims’ father Ki-taek is shown ascending an escalator with the Parks’ mother (41:00), showing the Kim family’s ascent into a higher level of class and opportunity.

  • in the second half of the film as their plan starts to fall apart, they are forced to return home in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, scaling down several flights of stairs in the pouring rain (1:33:10).

  • using a series of wide shots, the Kim family descending the flights of stairs reflects their descending of the social hierarchy as their position in the Park household, and in turn their economic security, is compromised

• Ki-woo’s smell

  • repeated comments which underscores the inescapability of class and ultimately triggers the rage in the climax

  • Mr. Park distastefully recounts to his wife the pungent smell which emanates from Ki-taek and “people who ride the subway” (1:28:40).

  • Mr. park reeling back at the smell of the panties

  • Mrs. Park runs errands while being driven around by Ki-taek. in part due to the flood of sewage water which ravaged their home the night before, his smell was particularly noticeable to Mrs. Park, which elicited visible disgust from her.

  • at the party, a dramatic and hectic scene played out in which the housekeeper’s husband, Geun-se, goes on a violent rampage which, among other things, results in himself being fatally stabbed. while trying to reach his car keys which became lodged under Geun-se, Mr. Park attempts to grab them but is visibly taken aback and disgusted by his smell (1:54:20)

Different and Variation

• The first scene, searching for wi-fi

  • the first instance of this occurs very early in the film when we see the Kim family search all around their small apartment for a stray wifi signal (2:55).

  • most of the camera shots in this scene are medium to close-up shots meant to invoke a claustrophobic feeling from being in the tiny basement apartment, as well as to get a more intimate feel with the characters.

  • mise-en-scene is very important in this scene as well, as we see just how small, cramped, and messy the Kim family’s apartment is, which is indicative of their social class.

  • this can be contrasted with the portion of the film revealing the Park residence, which uses wide establishing shots (13:00) and camera panning around the entirety of the property (13:45) to give a sense of spaciousness, privacy, and pristine-ness, characteristics more associated with the upper-class.

• Diets & clothes

  • the top-down camera angles and jump-cut edits at (39:50, 40:25) contrast the fresh fruit eaten at the Park household with the cheap, greasy pizza that the Kims eat together.

  • the Parks’ huge walk-in closet and wide selection of high-end clothes is juxtaposed with the Kims choosing from a pile of secondhand charity clothes (1:43:00).

• Ki-woo’s interview vs entering the Park’s House

  • hallways are incredibly different — Kim’s family’s is cluttered and crowded, whereas the Park family’s house is very sleek and minimalist, with nothing in the hallway but windows

• Rain and water imagery

  • the rain is tranquility for the Parks, who watch it from their luxurious home, but devastation for the Kims who lose their home to flooding = disparity between the classes

• Day and Night sequences

  • hidden vs exposed social structures

  • Park’s world exists in daylight, where privilege operates unseen

  • the Kims and the bunker dwellers exist at night, revealling the underworld of hidden labour and struggle

• Power differences

  • the Parks have a housekeeper who lives at the residence with them and will do any chore and favour desired by the Parks on a whim, and is both physically and financially subservient to them. Her room is shown as being on the first floor (44:30), while each of the members of the Park family all sleep on the top floor, showing their position above the working-class housekeeper socially and literally.

  • this is also echoed later in the film when it is revealed the housekeeper’s husband has been living beneath the house in a secret bunker.

  • the Kim family’s overwhelming lack of power is on display as well. they find it difficult to persuade even a pizza shop worker to hire Ki-woo as a part-time worker (5:20), even as they all surround her. with a medium shot that gradually zooms in on the pizza worker, this is also an example of how the limited amount of power the Kim family does have is from their strength in numbers and ability to coordinate and work together

  • Mr. Park emphasises the value of subordinates who don’t “cross the line” (43:40) by involving themselves too much in his business or positioning themselves as his peers.

  • while Mr. and Mrs. Park are shown lying together on their couch, the camera moves down to a low shot to show the Kims under a table within earshot (1:27:40). this repeats the allegory of representing class with one literally being physically above the other, while emphasising the powerlessness of the Kims beneath them who are forced to stay silent and undetected.

  • Mr. Park completely ignores both Ki-jung and Ki-woo, who are both bleeding profusely and need immediate medical attention, instead prioritising the unconscious Da-song. this is emblematic of the apathy that Mr. Park has for those from a lower social class. In retaliation for his contempt and carelessness, Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park, killing him.

• The climax

  • Park’s calm and idyllic celebration (order) is juxtaposed with the bloodshed and chaos that ensues (disorder)

  • the rapid tonal shift emphasises the fragility of class stability

Development

• Each member of the Kim family becomes employed by the Park family, moving upwards to join the others

• This development or progression cannot continue — the Kims cannot escape their class situation

• The latter half of the film seems the characters regress back down to the lower class

• Progression from Comedy to Tragedy

  • starts with lighthearted, slapstick humour as the Kims con their way into the house

  • shifts to a psychological thriller as tensions rise, and ends in tragedy and violence

• Ki-woo’s arc

  • begins with hopeful ambition, his aspirations get quickly crushed by the final act’s violent reality, and it ends in the dulsional fantasy, leaving the audience with an unresolved and cyclical ending

Unity and Disunity

• Scholar Rock

  • given by Ki-woo’s friend; it’s a rock they admire a lot and is a very important gift to them

  • later on, we see it float when their house is flooded = a rock that heavy wouldn’t float, meaning it’s fake. the promises of this kind of wealth were never going to eventuate for them

  • the stone is a symbol of Ki-woo’s obsession with status – finding it while at one of his lowest points in the story tells us exactly how his character is changing. instead of focusing on the imminent danger of himself, his family, or what to do to get through the night – Ki-woo becomes fixated on protecting their chance for social mobility

• The climax breaks hope of class unity

  • the film builds towards integration but the violent climax shatters any harmony

  • the murder of Mr Park is a rupture, destroying any possibility of coexistence

Genre

• Tragedy (https://screentherapyblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/28/status-anxiety-parasite/)

  • hubris, downfall of protagonist, characters are relatable, we want them to succeed and have a happy ending

  • Tragic conflicts are between extrinsic goals for power of wealth and intrinsic moral or prosocial pursuits

  • the cause of the tragedy, the acute condition that plagued all the characters, poor or rich, and the force that motivated the final crimes of the film was ‘status anxiety’

  • status anxiety is the anxiety concerned with status — how one is seen, judged, valued based on occupation, wealth, or consumerism. parasite shows how malignant and destructive this can be

  • the kim family are the most obvious victims of status anxiety, as they know the sorrows of being seen as lesser than, growing more and more bitter. after they’re confronted with the lines/boundaries enforced by the rich, they struggle to reconcile how they’re seen and treated because of their low status and the knowledge that they deserve more dignity and comfort

  • we see through them that they don’t choose poverty – they are unlucky, unsupported, and marginalised. Those in impoverished conditions are usually made invisible by status anxiety in real life – those who observe status rules have learned to ignore real-life Kims or think harshly of them and their lifestyle  – but ****by making a family like the Kims our main characters in a film like this – they are brought out of the obscurity they’re usually kept in in real life and quickly become sympathetic underdogs that everyone wants to root for.

  • even the rich aren’t exempt from a few negative effects from status anxiety. the Kims constantly describe the Parks as nice, naive, and simple. these are both virtues and weaknesses. with so many social and physical resources insulating them from the outside world, they can afford to be blind to the struggles of those who work around them to build them up.

  • in the end, all the emotional violence in this film was instigated by the deep anxiety and frustration around status its grip on access to human dignity – both status and dignity are treated as nonrenewable and rare resources that only the rich deserve and dole out leaving people on the lower rungs trapped in a position to be loathed or ignored by those above them, those around them, and even themselves.

• Gender (https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/dpdfilm/chapter/parasite-2019/)

  • the roles the female characters generally take on in the film when it comes to family life are relevant as well. the members of the Kim family all seem to consider themselves as equals, no matter the gender. it isn’t until they immerse themselves in the household of the Parks and their upper-class environment that they begin to replicate gendered norms, such as the mother becoming the new housekeeper.

  • the Park family is much more patriarchal. the mother stays at home and takes care of the kids, while the father is the sole breadwinner of the household. he also seems to give preferential treatment to his younger son as opposed to his high school-aged daughter, only ever interacting with her to scold her.

  • this depiction of gender in the film is representative of the notion that higher social class and wealth are often closely tied with male power in society and the fact that the higher up the social ladder you go, the more patriarchal it generally becomes.