The Ontology of Film Theory

The rise of Italian neo-realist cinema after the Second World War changed the air of film theory. The documentary theories represented by A. Bazin of France and S. Krakauer of the United States achieved a status comparable to that of montage theory from the 1950s onward.

Bazin was first and foremost a film critic, but his essays went beyond the nature of practice and had important theoretical value. He left behind a large body of essays on cinema, which were compiled into a four-volume collection, What is Cinema? .

Bazan's ontology of the cinematic image and his theory of the long shot (or scene scheduling theory) are the foundation and core of his theoretical system.

The ontology of film seeks to prove the "ontological" essence of film, the connection between film and existence, film and reality. In addition to Bazan and Krakauer, there are also O. Panofsky and S. Cavell in the U.S., but Bazan's and Krakauer's theoretical system is the most complete and influential.

Bazan believed that the movie is essentially "the art of truth". In the preface to the anthology, he states, "We shall necessarily begin with the photographic image, which is the basic element of the final synthesis, and then use it as a starting point for a brief (if not a theory, at least) analysis of the language of the cinema, whose thesis rests on the assumption that it is intrinsically real."

Bazan argues that the invention of the photographic technique fulfilled man's longstanding attempt to create an ideal world that conformed to the original appearance of reality, but which was independent and self-existent in time. Therefore, the transition from painting to photography, the most essential phenomenon is the psychological factor, which completely satisfies the exclusion of human beings, relying solely on mechanical reproduction to create the illusion of the desire; people finally gained a "privilege not to let people intervene in" the art. Based on photogrammetry, "the concept of the cinema was equated with the complete and unadulterated reproduction of reality, and their first concern was to reproduce a vision of the external world with sound, color, stereoscopy, and so on."

Bazan finds the best practical example of ontological theory in Italian neorealist cinema, pointing out that an artist's authentic reproduction of reality is not the same as abandoning his or her creative task. For it is no easier to convey facts about people and societies than it is to convey subjective images: "The 'realist' form in art has always been first and foremost a form of profound 'aesthetic significance'. ...... In art, reality, like imagination, is the artist's unique treasure, and it is no easier to embody the concrete content of reality in a literary or cinematic work than it is to embody the most outlandish dreams of the imagination."

Based on his ontology of cinema, Bazán constructed his theoretical edifice of the long shot. The two central arguments of this theory are: ① Opposing the supremacy of montage. ② Emphasize the multiplicity of reality.

Bazan fiercely opposed the montage theory of Eisenstein and others. He pointed out that the movie only became an art from the montage quote, had temporarily played a positive role, but its effectiveness has been exhausted. Montage is a literary and most anti-cinematic device. The character of cinema, in its pure state, is, on the contrary, the strict observance of spatial unity in photography. But he is not absolutely opposed to the use of montage, but believes that it is necessary in cinema only in such cases: to create the necessary unreality. This is because part of the function of the movie is to enable the viewer to enjoy the pleasure of illusion, and if it is too real, it precludes illusion altogether. He therefore felt that the following principle could be proposed as a law of aesthetics: the use of montage is inadmissible in cases where two or more elements of the action must be represented simultaneously in order to elucidate the essence of an event; the right to use montage is restored as soon as the significance of the action is no longer dependent on physical proximity. Bazán's theory of the limits of montage is based on the polysemy of reality. He points out that reality is polysemic, and that montage is fundamentally opposed to polysemy by its very nature.

Bazan emphasizes the polysemy of reality in order to demand that film creators highlight the meaning of events through their choices. He argues that the narrative unit of the film is not the shot, but the event, which is a slice of concrete reality, and that reality itself is multifaceted and polysemous, with the exact meaning of an event being reversed only after gleaning its connection to some other event. He also argues that while it is true that the cinema can only largely grasp its object externally, it has a thousand means of dealing with the appearance of the object, of clearing away all ambiguous meanings, of making the appearance of things into a symbol reflecting a single inner reality; and that the existence of the screen image presupposes the necessary, clear causal relationship between emotion and its external manifestation.

Bazan argues that the person who "realizes" the "exact meaning" of a polysemous reality should be the audience. For this to happen, the viewer must have a choice in the content of the image when watching a movie. Only uncut depth-of-field shots can give the audience this right. Citing the films of O. Wells as an example, Bazan points out that the director used the depth-of-field shot to stimulate the audience in Citizen Kane, a technique that forces the audience to use their free attention and at the same time makes them aware of the multiple contradictions of the facts, which gives his depth-of-field shot a triple truth, namely, ontological truth, dramatic truth, and psychological truth. He praises The Ambersons Family for the fact that its camera passages are never merely passive shots of the action in the same scene; its refusal to divide up the events and to break down spatially where the drama takes place is a positive maneuver that has a much better effect than the classic split shot might have produced.

S. Krakauer was another American film scholar originally of German origin. He took Bazan's theoretical premises and wrote The Nature of the Film (1960), based on more than 40 years of "moviegoing experience," which took Documentary theory to its logical conclusion.

Krakauer said his theory of the movie was an "aesthetics of substance," not form. He was concerned with content. He bases his argument on the fact that "the movie is by its very nature a photographic outgrowth, and thus, like the photographic medium, has a palpable affinity with the world around us. It is when the movie records and reveals material reality that it becomes a movie in name only."

Like Bazan, Krakauer leaves behind traditional notions of art in order to view film, but goes further than Bazan. He asserts that traditional notions of art "do not and cannot apply to a truly 'cinematic' film" because traditional art is "from the top to the base," i.e., from ideological intention The reason is that traditional art is "from top to bottom", i.e., it starts from an ideological intention to digest the material reality, whereas cinema is "from bottom to top", i.e., it starts from a truthful reflection of the material reality and ends up with a certain question or belief. Thus, "if cinema is an art, it is an unusual art" and "the only art that maintains the integrity of its material."

Krakauer's theoretical aim was to find a way to develop cinema in the best possible way by examining all kinds of films. To this end, he analyzed the materials and methods of cinema in detail, and rejected all "non-cinematic" forms and contents. He set up his standard of "cinematography" and finally demonstrated the laws and possibilities of cinema in the general context of human activity.

Krakauer summarizes his notion of "cinematization" in terms of "the restoration of material reality". In order to achieve the purpose of "restoration", he only allowed the movie to perform the two functions of "record" and "revelation", and excluded all the movies designed by the artist with clear ideological intentions and with a beginning and an end in the story structure. He rejected all films designed by artists, with clear ideological intentions, and with a beginning and an end in terms of story structure. Even experimental films in purely audiovisual form were rejected because, in his opinion, while such films tended to avoid telling a story, they did so with little regard for the proximity of the cinematic means, ignoring the reality in front of the camera; they abrogated the principle of the story only in order to set up the principle of art, which perhaps gained from the "revolution" in the course of which art was recognized as a "revolutionary" force. In this "revolution" perhaps art has benefited. Cinema, on the other hand, gained nothing.

For Krakauer, the most "cinematic" form and content is the "found story and the episode". The so-called "found story" has three characteristics: (1) it is discovered, not conceived; (2) it is an important potential element of the natural material, which rarely develops into an independent and self-contained whole; (3) it reproduces some typical contingencies in the world around us, and enables them to be realized out of the flow of life through the camera's revelation, and then to be realized again. stream of realization and subsequently disappears into the stream of life.

Krakauer was keenly aware that the strict criteria of value he laid down for the cinema would inevitably be refuted, for his rejection of all "non-cinematic" subjects could not find any basis within the scope of film theory except in his own unique beliefs and passions for the cinema. So he turns to the broader context of changes in human thought and activity to argue for his functional theory of cinema. According to Krakauer, the significance of going to the movies lies in the fact that it makes it possible for modern man to experience material reality and to shift his attention from the inner world to the external phenomena of life. Modern man is in great need of this "diversion" because he suffers from "ideological vacuity" and "cognitive abstraction". He argues that the relationship between the inner world and the external reality of man has changed profoundly over the past three or four centuries. Two of these changes are particularly noteworthy: the gradual loss of the belief in ****anism and the steady rise in the prestige of science. Since modern people no longer have *** same faith, they are skeptical of the role of reason, and tend to anti-rationalism; on the other hand, the development of science has led people to "mathematize the real phenomena", and to turn the concrete material content of things into abstract understanding. Both of them finally made the viewers become a "lonely crowd" who were indifferent to the view of reality. Only cinema can help people "experience the world through the camera" and revitalize it from its hibernation, from its false non-existence.

J. Mitri The most recent representative of the holistic study of cinema is the French film professor J. Mitri. His two-volume work, The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, was published in 1963. It deals extensively with all the issues involved in film theory over the past 50 years, reviewing a wide range of different arguments and having a distinctly synthesizing character. According to the generalization of French film researcher C. Metz, Mitri mainly discussed 10 major issues in his work: (1) modern cinema; (2) the subjective camera; (3) the language of sound in cinema; (4) film music; (5) color in cinema; (6) purely "audio-visual" films; (7) the gradual rejection of the dramatic formula in cinema; (8) cinema and drama; (9) cinema and fiction; (10) metaphors and novels; and (11) the role of the cinema as a source of information for the public and the media. and the novel; and (10) metaphors, symbols, and language.

An important aim of Mitri's comprehensive theory is to critically reconcile the montage theory represented by Eisenstein and the ontological theory represented by Bazan. He makes a historical categorization of the film, namely the "montage" film and the "time-continuum" film, which he considers to be the two main forms of cinematic expression, but they are not incompatible. Pointing out the opposition between these two aesthetics only emphasizes the existence of a difference between two forms of cinematic approach. One form is equivalent in cinema to the language of poetry, the other to the language of fiction. Obviously, the two follow different principles. Whatever the novelist has to say, it is always hidden behind the protagonist, behind the apparent authenticity, and all his efforts are aimed at creating or recreating that authenticity. Not so the poet, who expresses ideas directly, who speaks with the facts, not merely through them. Mitri prefers the montage theory. He says: "We must first of all oppose the tendency which, in order to capture the 'real' reality, wants to turn the cinema into a purely documentary instrument, a machine for recording behavior. To a certain extent, cinema is documentary, but fortunately it is not entirely so, because the conditions of its existence definitely do not allow it to be so. When the movie is purely documentary, it necessarily undermines art." He criticized Bazin for opposing the theory of montage "by always seeming to choose some of the expressive techniques in bad films to attack and denigrate," "a practice that leads him to blame the misapplication of expressive methods? This approach led him to blame the poor application of the methods of expression for what was needed. But he rejects "the idea that the montage effect should be regarded as the centerpiece of cinematic expression." "seeing it as the basis of general aesthetics, rather than merely as a means of expressing personal style." He denounced the theory of "vaudeville montage" in Eisenstein's early writings and strongly rejected the analogy between montage and language. He argued that every abstract meaning in a movie must be rooted in our real senses, and that it was a misuse of the medium to try to use montage to do the work of language in order to convey abstract concepts. To that end, he lays out a detailed list of different montages, pointing out which are appropriate and which go against the very nature of cinema.

Structuralist-Semiotics in Film Theory The most recent form of development in film theory is structuralist-semiotics film studies. The representative of this research method, Chrissing? According to Metz, after Mitri, film theory should enter a "second period", moving from a comprehensive, generalized study to a precise, scientific, localized study, i.e., the establishment of a structuralist-semiotics film theory.

The reason for comparing structuralism and semiotics in film studies is that some structuralists, such as Metz, P. Warren, B. Nichols, U. Ekko, and Kristeva, are themselves semioticians, and their work is mainly a symbolic analysis of the film; and the second reason is that general semiotics research is often mixed with some elements of structuralist philosophy.

The structuralist-semiotics film theory has two main aspects, one is to make a general theoretical study of the film, trying to establish a scientific foundation for the film; the other is to use this science to carry out structuralist "reading" analysis of specific films. Metz's works On the Appearance of Meaning in Film (Vol. 1, 1968; Vol. 2, 1972) and Language and Film (1971) are the most representative.

Metz divides film studies into two kinds, the first is film studies in the broad sense, which includes the relationship between cinema and other activities, all the problems that may arise, such as technology, industrial organization, film censorship, audience response, and star worship. Cinema in the broad sense is the object of study of sociology, economics, social psychology, psychoanalysis, physics and chemistry. Secondly, the study of cinema in a narrow sense refers only to cinema itself, without involving the complex procedures of film production and the phenomena caused by cinema. Structuralist-semiotics film theory is limited to the internal study of the dynamics of the film, a "science of meaning", that is, the study of how the film communicates its meaning to the audience, and to formulate a clear model for such communication, and to find out the laws that constitute the experience of the film.

Metz argues that the core of cinema is the "emergence of meaning", that is, "the artificial process of understanding the message of a movie through a system of symbols". The character of the film's "manifestation of meaning" is determined by the film's unique "expressive material". It is neither reality itself nor montage, but "five material channels": (1) a variety of moving photographic images; (2) all the textual material that we see outside the screen; (3) recorded language; (4) recorded music; (5) recorded noise and sound effects. The task of film structuralism-semiotics is to analyze the "mixed meanings" of these "material channels".

Metz was against speaking of film as a language, and he denied that there was any "grammar" to film, but he was in favor of using linguistic principles in the study of film, and he adopted a series of linguistic terms, such as "code", "information", "system", "body", "juxtaposition", etc., of which the most crucial terms are "Symbol", it is the main research means of semiotics so-called "symbol" does not exist in the movie, it is the logical relationship according to which the information is conveyed, it is the symbol scholars study a series of films after the role of the rules in the film to summarize and organize the fabricated. Therefore, the "code" is the logical form in which the "expressive material" generates meaning and sends out information. Semiotics is the process of restoring the information in a movie based on the "codes" (acting, lighting, positioning, camera movement) that have been created.

Metz believes that there are three basic characteristics of "symbols": one is the "degree of uniqueness", such as "parallel montage", which is a unique feature of the movie. The first is the "degree of uniqueness", such as "parallel montage" is the unique "symbol" of the movie, which cannot be found in other arts. The second is "different levels of universality", such as panoramic shots belong to the most universal level, but jeans and western scenes in western movies belong to the special level. Thirdly, "it will be reduced to a sub-symbol". "Sub-symbol" is a kind of usage of "symbol". In different films at different times, "unique symbols" and "universal symbols" are used in different ways. According to this explanation, film structuralism-semiotics, as a general theoretical study, has to analyze the degree of uniqueness, the degree of ubiquity, and the degree of universality of each "code". As a general theoretical study, film structuralism-semiotics has to analyze the "degree of uniqueness", "degree of universality" of each "code", and the interactions between the "codes"; and when it is used to analyze the "reading" of a specific film, it has to point to the systematic arrangement and interlocking of countless "codes" in the work. Therefore, Metz says: "The movie is the sum of all the symbols plus their sub-symbols", and this "sum" can create "manifestations of meaning" from the "expressive material" of the movie. This "sum" can create "manifestations of meaning" from the "expressive material" of the film, and film theory is a "censorship" in favor of certain "codes" and against others. Film theory is a "censorship" in favor of certain "symbols" and against others. And the history of cinema is made up of the "sub-symbols" that have been used in the past.