ABSTRACT
Film is structured like a language. Or is it? Composed of fundamental units, called shots, films rely upon edits to join shots together into larger strings called sequences (a series of shots united in time and space), just as words become sentences. Many films depend for their intelligibility upon rules or cinematic conventions, a form of film grammar that has evolved over time. A military parade, such as the masses in motion in the German propaganda film Triumph des Willens / Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), always moves in the same onscreen direction, for example; flashbacks, or temporal ellipses of many sorts, are often signaled with a dissolve (that edit which joins two shots, the first fading while the second gradually appears). And, like a language, new elements, born of both technological innovation and imaginative invention, enter the cinematic lexicon, while others disappear or become anachronistic. Special effects master Dennis Muren’s compositing (mixing several visual components in one shot), as Hollywood insider Anne Thompson notes, “makes possible the morphing T-1000 in Terminator 2 (1991) and the fleet-footed dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993)” (A. Thompson 2005: 2). The use of the iris (another edit, a round mask that closes to black, or that
opens to begin a sequence, or that encircles an important detail) has even come in recent years to signify “old-fashioned,” associated as it is with the silent narrative cinema and with its trademark use in the Looney Tunes. Like language, film opens to different uses or forms. Some films are like stories, others more like novels or serials. Some films seem poetic; others, striving perhaps toward profundity, seem simply nonsensical. Some documentary films want their language to seem transparent, as much of the language of journalism aspires to be, while other films want us to do nothing more than to notice their language, as with filmic explorations of the avant-garde and other experimental makers.
