ABSTRACT
Such readers may have a point, as will become clear later in this chapter. Form, however, is inevitable. Art cannot do without form. No matter how lifelike a novel or a movie may seem, it is the end product of countless decisions that involve form. That is even true if we are not talking about fiction or a Hollywood movie, but about their real-life cousins reportage and documentary film. Imagine that we set up a camera on New York’s Times Square or in London’s Oxford Street, and let it run from dawn till nightfall. We might argue that here we really have a slice of life, the ultimate realism in movie-making: the camera has only registered what actually happened in that part of Times Square or Oxford Street covered by the lens (we have of course not moved the camera because that would have introduced a new perspective and would have constituted formal interference, no matter how rudimentary). But we would above all have the most boring movie ever made. What we would have is thousands of cars, cabs, buses, and pedestrians passing in front of the lens. We might have picked out one of these people, a man with a promisingly grim expression or a woman with extraordinary haste, and followed them with our camera. But in so doing we would immediately have been forced to make decisions on form. We could film the man or the woman while following them, and we could occasionally overtake them and get in front of them. We could rent a helicopter and film them from above. Whatever we do excludes at that particular moment all the other options that we have. Even documentaries, then, no matter how true to life they seem, are the end product of a long line of decisions on the way their material should be presented.
