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The Language of Film

© Ken Nared

LANGUAGE:... a system of signs, symbols and the rules for using them to carry information.

The language of film is expressed not in words and syllables but in image. Despites todays emphasis on good dialog the conveyer of a story on the film screen is what we see and not what we hear. Silent film audiences didn't need sound effects to understand what it meant when someone was shot or fell off a cliff. Although sound, in todays films very loud sound, certainly enhances our experience the basic language of image that movie goers responded to in the silent era is the same language that filmmakers use to elicit a response from us. The basic reason this language remains the same is that people have remained the same in terms of needs and wants. As we have discussed before, film fills a fundamental need for the belief in the possible for our lives.

Early filmmakers slowly discovered as they shifted from everyday scenes and documentaries that people reacted with greater emotion to some scenes and films than others. Keen to please their audiences the filmmakers took note of what evoked a greater emotional response from their patrons and began to incorporate these elements into their films. It is important to note that this wasn't formulaic pattern such as boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back. Far from it, what they discovered is how the mind likes to have a story presented in this particular medium.

One of the initial facts discovered about the language of the film medium is that it has to be brief in expression. That may sound crazy with some moderns films running three hours and over, but the idea of brevity in this case pertains to the expression of ideas. In a novel a characters thoughts and feeling can go on for pages, but in a film the same thoughts have to be conveyed in a few moments or the scene becomes boring. We have endless patience with a book but when an image hits the eye we take in all the information at once instead of having to assimilate each word as with a book. Our minds scream out, show me, don't tell me, what I need to know, and do it quick or I'm off to something else. Stop and think of a movie that bored you. Besides having a poor story most likely it had long scenes that went nowhere. Filmmakers understood they had to make their point quickly or lose their audience. But what happens if there is a lot of dialog that needs to be delivered? Filmmakers learned to keep the mind busy by using several different camera angles to keep feeding the eye new views of the same scene. One of the best example of the is the original Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the lost Ark. The early scene where Jones meets with the government men at the university goes on for almost ten minutes. Normally we'd be bored out of our minds but there are several camera angles that reveal the characters from all sides keeping our minds occupied while the vital information is delivered. Also look at almost any film directed by Orson Wells. He was a master of the camera angle, several of which he originated in Citizen Kane.