The document discusses key concepts of film form, including how form can create structured experiences and relationships among a film's parts through patterns. It explains that form can be content, as a viewer's relationship to the patterns influences their understanding. Additionally, it describes how filmmakers can build expectations through form to elicit reactions from viewers.

1. Chapter 2
The Significance of Film Form
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2. Form as Pattern
• Artwork creates a structured experience.
• Form can be created from patterns, which
construct an overall set of relationships
among a film’s parts.
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3. “Form” vs. “Content”
• Form can be content.
• How a viewer relates to the patterns
established by the filmmakers contributes to
the content of the film.
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4. Formal Expectations
• By building expectation, form can deliver
many reactions.
• Shock, surprise, satisfaction, and suspense all
build upon the viewer’s assumptions.
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5. Conventions and Experience
• Conventions are based on the viewer’s prior
experience.
• Artwork can create new expectations and
conventions.
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6. Form and Feeling
• Emotions within the artwork and emotional
responses from the viewer can interact.
• This relationship can be complicated and
affected by personal experience.
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7. Form and Meaning
• Referential: meanings within a film that rely
on familiarity with significant places or things.
• Explicit: meanings that are openly asserted.
• Implicit: an implied or interpreted meaning.
• Symptomatic: an abstract, general meaning
that depends on social ideology.
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8. Evaluation: Good, Bad, or
Indifferent?
• Criteria (realism, morality, coherence,
intensity, complexity, and originality) should
guide objective evaluation.
• Personal taste and “goodness” or “badness”
do not enter into evaluation.
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9. Principles of Film Form
• A unified set of related, interdependent
elements that create relationships between
the parts.
• Many are a matter of convention.
• Form follows function.
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10. Function
• Every element within a film can have one or
more function, fulfilling role(s) within the
whole system.
• Consider an element’s motivation when
looking for significant functions.
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11. Similarity and Repetition
• A significant element that is repeated in a film
is a motif.
• Patterns of motifs create expectation.
• Strong similarities and repetition can create
parallelism.
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12. Difference and Variation
• Changes and variations of elements can create
variety, contrast, and change.
• Seldom does repetition occur in exactly the
same way in a film, and the differences can be
meaningful.
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13. Development
• A progression moving from beginning to
middle to end.
• A segmentation can point out similarities,
differences, and progression.
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14. Unity and Disunity
• How relationships among elements come
together or do not.
• Creates broad patterns and thematic
meanings.
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