2004.09.13 - SLIDE 1IS246 - FALL 2004

Lecture 04: Formalist Media Theory

IS246Multimedia Information

Prof. Marc DavisUC Berkeley SIMS

Monday and Wednesday 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmFall 2004

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is246/f04/

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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• Sign, Signified, Signifier – The linguistic sign is the unity of the signifier

(a sound-image) and the signified (a concept)

Linguistic Sign

Concept

Sound-Image

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Linguistic Signs and Language

• The sign is arbitrary

• A multiplicity of signs is necessary to form any language

• The system of signs in language is over-complex

• Language exhibits a collective inertia toward innovation

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Linguistic Values

• Values are composed of– A dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for

the thing of which the value is to be determined

– Similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined

Signified

Signifier

Signified

Signifier

Signified

Signifier

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Differences

• “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.” (p. 120).

• “In reality the idea evokes not a form but a whole latent system that makes possible the oppositions necessary for the formation of the sign. By itself the sign would have no signification.” (p. 130).

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Syntagmatic and Associative Relations

Associative (Paradigmatic) Axis

Syntagmatic Axis

A

C’’

C’

B C D E

C’’’

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Why Study Formalist Film Theory?

• To provide a theoretical foundation for understanding the forms and functions of time-based media

• Unlike “Film Studies” per se, we use that understanding not to interpret films, but to analyze and design multimedia information systems– Video capture– Video analysis– Video retrieval– Video assembly– Video reuse– Video summarization (e.g., meeting recording)– User interfaces to audio-visual content and that use

audio-visual content

2004.09.13 - SLIDE 11IS246 - FALL 2004

Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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A

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AB

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ABA

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ABAC

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ABACA

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Expectations

• Suspense– Delay in fulfilling an established

expectation

• Surprise– Result of an expectation that is revealed

to be incorrect

• Curiosity– Construct hypotheses about prior events

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Perceiving Artistic Form

• Form– “The overall system of relations that we can

perceive among the elements in the whole film”

• In perceiving form, the spectator draws on– Cues within the work– Prior experiences

• Derived from everyday life• From other artworks

– Conventions and norms

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Principles of Film Form

• Function– What is this element doing there?– How does it cue us to respond?– Motivation (justification for the presence of an

element)• Similarity and repetition

– Motif (any significant repeated element in a film)– Parallelism (cues to compare two or more distinct

elements by highlighting some similarity)• Difference and variation• Development

– Progression moving from beginning to middle to end• Unity/Disunity

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Viewer’s Activity

• “The constant interplay between similarity and difference, repetition and variation, leads the viewer to an active developing awareness of the film’s formal system.” (p. 56)

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Narrative Form

• Narrative– A chain of events in cause-effect relationship

occurring in time and space

• Story and Plot– Story

• Set of all events in a narrative, both the ones explicitly represented and those the viewer infers

– Plot• Everything visibly and audibly present in the film• All the story events that are directly depicted

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Story and Plot

Story

Plot

Presumed and inferredevents

Explicitly presentedevents

Added nondiegeticmaterial

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Teeth Brushing Example

• Brushing Teeth– Protagonist stands in front of bathroom mirror– Protagonist opens medicine cabinet to

remove toothbrush and toothpaste tube– Protagonist squeezes out toothpaste on

toothbrush– Protagonist brushes teeth– Protagonist drinks water from glass– Protagonist spits out water and toothpaste

residue

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Time

• Temporal order– Flashback– Flashforward

• Temporal duration– Story duration– Plot duration– Screen duration

• Temporal frequency– Repetition of events

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Temporal Duration

• Story Duration– Example: Brushing teeth in story world (5 minutes)

• Plot Duration– Example: Brushing teeth in plot world (1 minute: 6

steps of ~10 seconds each)

• Screen Duration– Example: Brushing teeth (12 seconds: 3 shots of ~4

seconds each)

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Space

• Story space

• Plot space

• Screen space and offscreen space

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Narration

• Plot’s way of distributing story information in order to achieve specific effects

• Moment-by-moment process that guides us in building the story out of the plot

• Involves range and depth of story information

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Range of Story Information

• Spectrum of knowledge of the story world that viewers and characters have– Unrestricted (omniscient) narration– Restricted narration

• Creates “hierarchy of knowledge” among viewer and characters

• “Who knows what when?”

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Depth of Story Information

• How “deeply” the plot plunges into a character’s psychological states

• Continuum between objectivity and subjectivity• Subjectivity

– Perceptual subjectivity (hear and see what character perceives)• Point-of-view shot• Sound perspective

– Mental subjectivity (hear and see what character thinks)• Internal voices• Internal images

• “How deeply do I know the character’s perceptions, feelings, and thoughts?”

• Range and depth of knowledge are independent variables

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“Classical Hollywood Cinema”

• Action primarily arises from individual characters as causal agents

• The process of achieving goals desired by one or more characters drives the narrative’s development

• The protagonists’ goals come into conflict with other characters’ goals (antagonists) to create conflict

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“Classical Hollywood Cinema”

• The cause-effect chain drives narrative events• Plot time tends to depend on the story’s cause-

effect chain– “Dead time” is rarely shown– Appointments bring characters together at a specific

time and usually place– Deadlines makes plot duration dependent on the

cause-effect chain

• Narration tends to be “objective” and unrestricted

• Narrative usually has strong closure at the end (cause-effect chain ends with final effect)

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Megan Finn on Bordwell– What experiences influence the creation of

norms? When does a form become a convention? When it comes into the popular consciousness or when the art world discovers it? How can our understandings of norms influence real life?

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Megan Finn on Bordwell– If we were to build an “if you like, then try...”

film recommender system, what would be worth capturing in the metadata regarding form and narrative? People will generally say that they like a certain genre of film, are people also attracted to certain genres? Can a form cross genres?

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Cecelia On Kim on Bordwell– How is the composition of the shot and of an

edited space and time treated by various writers as a language? What justifications are given for the comparison of montage to language? What are the component parts of this language and how are they organized “semantically” and “syntactically”? How this language will translate to the audience?

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Cecelia On Kim on Bordwell– Eisenstein writes, "The conventional

descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process as well." What does Eisenstein mean about creating an "intellectual montage"? How does this idea relate to the concerns of Constructivism?

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Vijay Viswanathan on Bordwell– Bordwell talks about “form” as a complete structure,

but this seems to be such a vague definition or at least a misleading concept that suggests a film’s form is static. If the film’s form is a system of dynamically related parts, if we remove one of these parts, does the film now not have structure or is it now not a complete system? e.g., watching a film without sound, or a color film in black and white. What about new forms of multimedia that we haven’t been “trained” to know what the form should be, such as viewing a flash movie online? Where does the idea of “complete” form come from?

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Discussion Questions (Bordwell )

• Vijay Viswanathan on Bordwell– The text also uses an example of being frustrated by

“interruptions,” e.g., listening to music and having it stop or an uncompleted story. But if the form of a film is a system of segments and related parts, in absorbing multimedia, do our minds need interruptions – can we truly absorb streams of information without breaks or interruptions? Think of the difficulty of watching hours of silent film, or a film that’s one continuous take such as The Russian Ark. When are certain interruptions (such as fade outs or even sound) necessary versus detracting from the form of a film?

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Today’s Agenda

• Review of Last Time

– Semiotics

• Formalist Media Theory

– Film Form

– Narrative Form

– Narration

• Discussion Questions

• Action Items for Next Time

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Readings for Next Time

• Wednesday 09/15 (Mise-en-scene and Cinematography)– Textbook

• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson: Film Art: An Introduction. McGraw Hill, New York, 2003. Pages: 175-184 & 207-293.

• Jeff, Brooke, Nick

• Did you all get SIMS computer accounts?