2.2.4: Form, Content, and the Power of Cinema

We will be able to see what was once invisible.

As we become more attuned to the various tools and techniques filmmakers use to communicate their ideas, we can analyze their effectiveness better. We’ll be able to see what was once invisible. It's a kind of magic trick in itself. But as I tried to make clear from the beginning, my goal is not to focus solely on form, to dissect cinema into its constituent parts and lose sight of its overall power. Like any art form, cinema is more than the sum of its parts. And it should be clear already that form and content go hand in hand. Pure form, all technique, and no substance is meaningless. And pure content, all story and no style is didactic and, frankly, boring. How the story is told is as important as what the story is about.

However, just as we can analyze technique, the formal properties of cinema, to better understand how a story is communicated, we can also analyze content, that is, what stories are communicating, to better understand how they fit into the wider cultural context. Again, Cinema, like literature, can represent valuable cultural documents, reflecting our ideas, values, and morals back to us as filmmakers and audiences.

We’ll spend more time on content analysis – the idea of cinema as a cultural document – in the last couple of chapters of this book, but I want to take a moment to highlight one aspect of that analysis in advance. I’ve discussed at length the idea of cinematic language and the fact that, as a form of communication, it is largely invisible or subconscious. Interestingly, the same can be said for cinematic content. Or, more specifically, the cultural norms that shape cinematic content. Cinema is an art form like any other, shaped by humans bound up in a given historical and cultural context. No matter how enlightened and advanced those humans may be, that historical and cultural context is so vast and complex that they cannot possibly grasp every aspect of how it shapes their view of the world. Inevitably, those cultural blind spots, the unexamined norms and values that make us who we are, filter into the cinematic stories we tell and how we tell them.

The result is a kind of cultural feedback loop where cinema both influences and is influenced by the context in which it is created.

Because of this, on the whole, cinema is inherently conservative. That is to say, as a form of communication, it is more effective at conserving or re-affirming a particular view of the world than challenging or changing it. This is due in part to the economic reality that cinema, historically a very expensive medium, must appeal to the masses to survive. As such, it tends to avoid offending our collective sensibilities to make us feel better about who we already think we are. It is also partly due to the social reality that the people who historically had access to the capital required to produce that very expensive medium tend to all look alike. That is, primarily white and mostly men. And when the same kind of people with the same kind of experiences tend to have the most consistent access to the medium, we tend to get the same kinds of stories, reproducing the same, often unexamined, norms, values, and ideas.

But that doesn’t mean cinema can’t challenge the status quo or at least reflect real, systemic change in the wider culture already underway. That’s what makes the study of cinema, particularly in regard to content, so endlessly fascinating. Whether it’s tracking the way cinema reflects the dominant cultural norms of a given period or the way it sometimes rides the leading edge of change in those same norms, cinema is a window – or frame (see what I did there) – through which we can observe the mechanics of cultural production, the inner-workings of how meaning is produced, shared, and sometimes broken down over time.