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Importance Of Film Language In Cinema

1582 Words7 Pages

Everything in this universe communicates. Cinema, too, has its own communication patterns. It is a language system in itself. “Film is not a language in the sense that English, French, or Mathematics is …. But film is very much like a language.” “The penetrating eye f the camera helps to eternalize the object it sees, and the strength of the film lies in its giving a clear representation detail.” One way to analyze the film language is to compare it with other communicative arts. According to this school, the shot is the word of film, the scene its sentence, and sequence its paragraph. Punctuations are provided by cuts, wipes, dissolves, fade ups, fade downs, super impositions etc. Montage or/and image compositions determine the narrative …show more content…

According to V.I. Pudovkin, one of the great Russian film masters who developed theories of montage, “the foundation of film art is editing”. (Giannetti, L. (1999). Understanding Movies, Prentice Hall, New Jersey). Editing can control what we see on the screen, how we see it-the order in which we see each and every visual-the timing of the shots and pace of storytelling. The role of editing is not limited to eliminating unwanted time and space alone, rather it is a process that gives a film its own rhythm. Terry Ramsaye refers to editing as the “syntax of cinema, its grammatical language. Like linguistic syntax, the syntax of editing must be learned. We don’t possess it innately.” Giannetti, L. (1999). Understanding Movies, Prentice Hall, New Jersey). When films started to narrate stories, editing became a necessity to arrange visuals sequentially. “The word ‘edit’ often means ‘to cut out’: in audio-visual texts it refers to the join between shots. The purpose of conventional editing is to make this join as smooth as possible….to make the join seem invisible. This can only happen if …show more content…

While Kuleshov experimented with cutting films and resembling them, Eisenstein came up with his collision theory which proclaimed that the collision of two shots produces an entirely new idea which is not present in either of the two. According to this school of editing, cuts should stimulate the viewer. Unlike continuity style, montage cutting employs overlapping edits and shot repetition, which compresses or expands time. So a montage sequence is created by joining many separate shots some of which can be repeated in the same sequence. Shots are juxtaposed to build dramatic tension. The emphasis is on dynamic, sometimes discontinuous, relationships between shots and the juxtaposition of images to create ideas which are not inherent to either shot by

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