2.2.3: Explicit And Implicit Meaning

Cinematic language turns shots into stories through editing and visual syntax.

Once we have a grasp on these small, meaningful units of our collective cinematic language, we can begin to analyze how they work together to communicate bigger, more complex ideas. This cinematic language begins with foundational elements crafted by the screenwriter, who transforms an idea into a visual story through structured storytelling.

Screenwriters shape a narrative that will unfold visually on screen by starting with a core logline, theme, and character development.

A logline—a single sentence that captures the protagonist, goal, conflict, and stakes—encapsulates the essence of the screenplay. This concise statement forms the “hook” for the story, establishing the initial connection between filmmaker and audience. 

Example \(\PageIndex{1}\)

A logline is the seed of your story. It must capture your protagonist, their goal, the conflict that stands in the way, and what’s at stake—all in a single sentence. A strong logline not only clarifies your narrative, but also conveys the emotional and thematic core of your film.

Protagonist: Who is the main character?

Your protagonist is the person whose journey defines the story.

• In Spirited Away, it’s Chihiro, a reluctant ten-year-old thrown into a spirit world where she must grow up quickly.

• In Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, it’s Sean, an outsider who must adapt to a subculture built on speed, loyalty, and codes he doesn’t understand.

• In Adrift in Tokyo, it’s Fumiya, a broke law student whose unexpected walk across Tokyo becomes a slow, spiritual reawakening.

Goal: What does the protagonist want or need?

The goal is the driving force behind the plot—it can be external (win the race, escape danger) or internal (belong, forgive, remember).

• In Your Name, Mitsuha wants to escape her provincial life, but after switching bodies with a Tokyo boy, her true goal becomes to remember and connect across time and memory.

• In Shoplifters, Osamu wants to keep his found family together, even as social forces threaten to expose and dismantle it.

• In Jujutsu Kaisen: Shibuya Incident, Yuji must survive and protect civilians, but more deeply, he’s wrestling with the goal of maintaining his humanity in the face of escalating violence and loss.

Conflict: What’s standing in their way?

Conflict is the friction that gives a story stakes. It can be internal (fear, guilt), interpersonal (another character), or systemic (culture, time, class).

• In 13 Assassins, the assassins face not just a powerful sadist protected by the state, but the moral weight of sacrificing themselves to stop him.

• In Kubi, characters battle shifting loyalties, treachery, and the inevitability of death—all within the political chaos of a crumbling power structure.

• In Initial D, Takumi’s conflict is twofold: external (challenging elite racers) and internal (finding motivation and purpose beyond obligation).

Spirited Away:
A timid girl must navigate a mysterious spirit world to rescue her parents and reclaim her identity—or risk being forgotten forever.

13 Assassins:
Thirteen warriors must assassinate a sadistic lord protected by the state, knowing their mission could spark civil war—but also restore justice to a corrupt empire.

Your Name:
When a city boy and a rural girl begin switching bodies, they must find a way to meet before time—and memory—erases their connection forever.

Take the work of Lynne Ramsay, for example. As a director, Ramsay builds a cinematic experience by paying attention to the details, the little things we might otherwise never notice:

Cinema builds up meaning through the creative combination of these smaller units, but, also like literature, the whole is – or should be – much more than the sum of its parts. For example, Moby Dick is a novel that explores the nature of obsession, the futility of revenge, and humanity’s essential conflict with nature. However, in the more than 200,000 words that make up that book, few, if any, of them communicate those ideas directly. In fact, we can distinguish between explicit meaning, that is, the obvious, directly expressed meaning of a work of art, be it a novel, painting, or film, and implicit meaning, the deeper, essential meaning, suggested but not necessarily directly expressed by any one element. Moby Dick is explicitly about a man trying to catch a whale, but as any literature professor will tell you, it was never really about the whale.

That comparison between cinema and literature is not accidental. Both start with the same fundamental element, that is, a story. As we will explore in a later chapter, cinema begins with the written word in the form of a screenplay before a single frame is photographed. And like any literary form, screenplays are built around a narrative structure. Yes, that’s a fancy way of saying story, but it’s more than simply a plot or an explicit sequence of events. A well-conceived narrative structure provides a foundation for that deeper, implicit meaning a filmmaker, or really any storyteller, will explore through their work.

This progression aligns with the internal shifts and external conflicts that build the story’s implicit meaning as each stage draws out deeper aspects of the character's arc and theme. By guiding the protagonist through cycles of conflict, growth, and resolution, screenwriters use the Story Circle to ensure that every beat in the story supports the protagonist’s transformation and aligns with the theme, creating a cohesive, character-driven experience.

Another way to think about that deeper, implicit meaning is as a theme, an idea that unifies every element of the work, gives it coherence and communicates what the work is really about. And really great cinema manages to suggest and express that theme through every shot, scene, and sequence. Every camera angle and camera move, every line of dialogue and sound effect, and every music cue and editing transition will underscore, emphasize, and point to that theme without ever needing to spell it out or make it explicit. An essential part of analyzing cinema is identifying that thematic intent and tracing its presence throughout.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Every scene in your film should reflect a core theme—a central idea or question that gives meaning to your characters’ actions and the story you’re telling. This exercise will help you and your team clarify that theme so it can guide every creative decision you make.

Part 1: Identify the Theme

Start with this prompt as a group:

“Our scene is about...”

Push past plot. Focus on an idea, not an event.
Some examples:

• Abandonment

• Belonging

• Revenge

• Transformation

• Shame

• Forgiveness

• Resilience

Examples from our films:

• Tsukigakirei is about how emotional vulnerability takes courage—and how silence can say more than words.

• 13 Assassins is about sacrificing individual lives to restore collective justice.

• Spirited Away explores how identity can be lost and rebuilt through labor, memory, and care.

Part 2: Show How the Theme Emerges

Once you’ve defined the theme, explain how it plays out in your scene:

• What decision, conflict, or relationship expresses this theme?

• Is the theme made clear through change, tension, or a moment of realization?

Example: In Shoplifters, the moment when the family shares a stolen meal isn’t just bonding—it’s a quiet rejection of society’s definition of legitimacy and love.

Example: In Your Name, the theme of longing is clearest in the moment the characters forget each other. Absence becomes the strongest expression of connection.

Part 3: Test the Theme’s Depth

Use these questions with your group to check if the theme is meaningfully integrated:

• Is the theme just stated—or is it revealed through action?

• Do all key moments in the scene support or challenge the theme?

• Does the theme evolve? (If not, should it?)

• Could someone who watches the scene feel what it’s about without being told?

Part 4: Refine and Align

After writing or storyboarding, revisit your theme:

• Cut anything that distracts or contradicts it.

• Look for stronger ways to highlight the theme through character choice, structure, or emotional tension.

• Ask: Is this scene really about what we said it’s about?

Reminder: In Kubi, loyalty is repeatedly performed, betrayed, and redefined—not through dialogue, but through beheadings, shifting alliances, and quiet nods before death. That’s how theme lives in the bones of a scene.

Your theme is your anchor. If the story, characters, and emotions don’t circle back to it, revise until they do. This is what turns a project into a statement.

Unless there is no thematic intent or the filmmaker did not take the time to make it a unifying idea. Then, you may have a “bad” movie on your hands.

But at least you’re well on your way to understanding why!

So far, this discussion of explicit and implicit meaning, theme, and narrative structure points to a deep kinship between cinema and literature. But cinema has far more tools and techniques at its disposal to communicate meaning, implicit or otherwise. Visual storytelling is a crucial part of a screenplay’s preparation for the screen, where writers must think about how scenes will look and sound rather than how they read on the page.

Setting, symbols, and actions take on a heightened role, as screenwriters rely on visual and auditory elements to communicate the story’s mood, themes, and character emotions. A rainy alley might evoke suspense, while a sunlit beach could convey peace or nostalgia. Props, too, can serve as symbols, hinting at deeper ideas or establishing connections to the character’s inner journey. Even character actions and subtext come into play, as actions often imply emotions indirectly.

For example, instead of a character explicitly stating, 'I’m anxious,' we might see them nervously tapping their foot, letting the visuals express emotion more subtly.

From these basics, cinema builds a layered system of meaning, with sound, performance, and visual composition adding even further depth.

Let’s take sound, for example. As you know from the brief history of cinema in the last chapter, cinema existed long before the introduction of synchronized sound in 1927, but since then, sound has become an equal partner with the moving image in the communication of meaning. Sound can shape how we perceive an image, just as an image can change how we perceive a sound. It’s a relationship we call co-expressive.

This is perhaps most obvious in the use of music. A non-diegetic musical score, that is, music that only the audience can hear as it exists outside the world of the characters, can drive us toward an action-packed climax or sweep us up in a romantic moment. It can also contradict what we see on the screen, creating a sense of unease at an otherwise happy family gathering or making us laugh during a moment of excruciating violence. In fact, this powerful combination of moving images and music pre-dates synchronized sound. Even some of the earliest silent films were shipped to theaters with a musical score meant to be played during projection.

But as powerful as music can be, sound in cinema is much more than just music. Sound design includes music but also dialog, sound effects, and ambient sound to create a rich sonic context for what we see on the screen. From the crunch of leaves underfoot to the steady hum of city traffic to the subtle crackle of a cigarette burning, what we hear – and what we don’t hear – can put us in the scene with the characters in a way that images alone could never do, and as a result, add immeasurably to the effective communication of both explicit and implicit meaning.

We can say the same about the relationship between cinema and theater. Both use a carefully planned mise-en-scene – the overall look of the production, including set design, costume, and make-up – to evoke a sense of place and visual continuity. Both employ the talents of well-trained actors to embody characters and enact the narrative structure laid out in the script.

Let’s focus on acting for a moment. Theater, like cinema, relies on actors’ performances to communicate not only the subtleties of human behavior but also the interplay of explicit and implicit meaning. How an actor interprets a line of dialog can make all the difference in how a performance shifts our perspective, draws us in or pushes us away. And nothing ruins a cinematic or theatrical experience like “bad” acting. But what do we really mean by that? Often it means the performance wasn’t connected to the thematic intent of the story, the unifying idea that holds it all together. We’ll even use words like, “The actors seemed like they were in a different movie from everyone else.” That could be because the director didn’t clarify a theme in the first place, or perhaps they didn’t shape or direct an actor’s performance toward one. It could also simply be poor casting.

All of the above applies to both cinema and theater, but cinema has one distinct advantage: the intimacy and flexibility of the camera. Unlike theater, where your experience of a performance is dictated by how far you are from the stage, the filmmaker has complete control over your point of view. She can pull you in close, allowing you to observe every tiny detail of a character’s expression, or she can push you out further than the cheapest seats in a theater, showing you a vast and potentially limitless context. And perhaps most importantly, cinema can move between these points of view in the blink of an eye, manipulating space and time in a way live theater never can. All of those choices affect how we engage the thematic intent of the story and how we connect to what that particular cinematic experience really means. And because of that, in cinema, whether we realize it or not, we identify most closely with the camera. No matter how much we feel for our hero up on the screen, we view it all through the lens of the camera.

And that central importance of the camera is why the most prominent tool cinema has at its disposal in communicating meaning is visual composition. Despite the above emphasis on the importance of sound, cinema is still described as a visual medium. Even the title of this chapter is How to Watch a Movie. It is not so surprising when you think about the lineage of cinema and its origin in the fixed images of the camera obscura, daguerreotypes, and series photography. All of which owe a debt to painting as an art form and a form of communication. In fact, the cinematic concept of framing has a clear connection to the literal frame, or physical border, of paintings. One of the most powerful tools filmmakers – and photographers and painters – have for communicating explicit and implicit meaning is simply what they place inside the frame and what they leave out.

Another word for this is composition, the arrangement of people, objects, and settings within the frame of an image. And if you’ve ever pulled out your phone to snap a selfie or maybe a photo of your meal to post on social media (I know, I’m old, but really? Why is that a thing?), you are intimately aware of the power of composition. Adjusting your phone this way and that to get just the right angle, to include just the right bits of your outfit, maybe edge Greg out of the frame just in case things don’t work out (sorry, Greg). The point is that composing a shot is a powerful way to tell stories about ourselves daily. Filmmakers, the really good ones, are masters of this technique. Once you understand this principle, you can start to analyze how a filmmaker uses composition to serve their underlying thematic intent to help tell their story.

One of the most important ways a filmmaker uses composition to tell their story is through repetition, a pattern of recurring images that echoes a similar framing and connects to a central idea. And like the relationship between shots and editing – where individual shots only really make sense once they are juxtaposed with others – a well-composed image may be exciting or even beautiful on its own, but it only starts to make sense in relation to the implicit meaning or theme of the overall work when we see it as part of a pattern.

Take, for example, Stanley Kubrick and his use of one-point perspective:

Or how Barry Jenkins uses color in Moonlight (2016):

Or how Sofia Coppola tends to trap her protagonists in gilded cages:

These recurring images are part of that largely invisible cinematic language. We aren’t necessarily supposed to notice them, but we are meant to feel their effects. And it’s not just visual patterns that can serve the filmmaker’s purposes. Recurring patterns, or motifs, can emerge in the sound design, narrative structure, mise-en-scene, dialog, and music.

Setting the Scene with Visual Storytelling

Unlike novels, screenplays rely on what can be seen and heard. Screenwriters must think cinematically—how each moment looks, sounds, and feels—because meaning is built through image and behavior.

Environment

Settings aren’t just places—they reflect emotional states. In Adrift in Tokyo, the city is stripped of glamour. Empty alleys, coin laundromats, and quiet riverbanks externalize the characters’ drift through grief, guilt, and stalled adulthood. Tokyo becomes not a backdrop, but a mirror.

Objects and Symbols

Props and repetition create metaphor. In Shoplifters, the act of stealing groceries is more than survival—it’s ritual. Shared food, threadbare clothing, and tight living quarters become symbols of an improvised family, where love operates outside legality. No character explains this; we feel it through what they touch and carry.

Action and Subtext

Characters don’t need to explain what they feel—they show us. In Shoplifters, a child clutches a woman’s hand longer than expected. In Adrift in Tokyo, a man walks one step behind. These small, unspoken actions reveal longing, dependence, and emotional negotiation far more powerfully than dialogue.

However, one distinction should be made between how we think about composition and patterns in cinema and how we think about those concepts in photography or painting. While all of the above employ framing to achieve their effects, photography and painting are limited to what the artist fixed in that frame at the moment of creation. Only cinema adds a distinct dimension to the composition: movement. That includes movement within the frame – as actors and objects move freely, recomposing themselves within the fixed frame of a shot – and the movement of the frame itself, as the filmmaker moves the camera in the setting and around those same actors and objects. This increases the compositional possibilities exponentially for cinema, allowing filmmakers to layer in even more patterns that serve the story and help us connect to their thematic intent.