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. The logline sets up the journey, while the theme and character development give depth to the story, guiding the narrative arc and providing the implicit meanings that engage viewers on multiple levels.

Example \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Components of a Logline:

• • Protagonist: Who is the main character?
  • Goal: What does the protagonist want or need?
  • Conflict: What’s standing in their way?
  • Stakes: Why does this matter?

Example: “A talented pianist with stage fright must overcome her fear to perform in front of a world-famous composer or lose the chance to pursue her dream.

A good logline should make you curious, paint a vivid picture of the story’s stakes, and highlight what makes this story unique. It’s the seed from which your entire screenplay will grow.

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 \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Beyond the plot and characters, every screenplay has a theme: the deeper message or question the story explores. The theme gives the story resonance, creating a lasting impact on the audience. A theme doesn’t have to be overtly stated but should be woven subtly into the protagonist’s journey.

Developing Your Theme:

What’s the story really about? Think beyond the plot—are you exploring sacrifice, revenge, love, redemption, or self-discovery? How will this theme shape the protagonist’s choices? For instance, if your theme is courage, the protagonist’s journey should force them to face fear repeatedly.

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 visual and auditory elements. This is where screenwriters start to think about how scenes will look and sound rather than how they read.

• Environment: Establish settings that visually convey mood or tone. A rainy alley might evoke suspense, while a sunlit beach could convey peace or nostalgia.
• Objects and Symbols: Think about props that could symbolize something deeper or create visual metaphors.
• Action and Subtext: Instead of writing out characters’ emotions, use actions that hint at what they’re feeling. For example, instead of a character saying, “I’m anxious,” show them nervously tapping their foot.

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.