It’s a few days old, but I’ve just come around to Jim Emerson’s post “Tell me a story…or don’t,” in which he says everything that I’ve been thinking for years, but could never put into words so clearly because I am not nearly as good at film theory as Jim Emerson is, and he does it three or four times a week.
My own extremely utilitarian take on the matter (I was trained as a film maker after all, not a film critic, and utilitarianism is in my blood) is that film can be thought of as the culmination of several “modules”:
-Plot, or as it’s often called, “story”; but story is what happens in a sort of “objective” sense, while plot is what happens in the movie, and in what order
-Dialogue
-Acting
-Editing
-Music
-Diegetic sound
-The bundle of lighting, focus, composition and camera movement that is typically referred to by the blanket term “cinematography” despite the fact that those four elements are all separable, and the result of work done by three people: the director, the cinematographer and the gaffer
–Mise en scène, French for “whatever the hell you want it to mean”; the appearance of the space in which the film occurs
That’s eight things (did I miss any?), and any film can have one or five or all eight of them turn out very well or very poorly – I’d argue that those films we describe with words like “masterpiece” are generally those in which all eight are good individually, as well as working in concert with each other. But there is a marked tendency for most people to regard plot as the primary driving force behind whether a film is good or not, and that the other seven are fripperies – that good editing or good acting are simply bonuses in a movie that is already “good” in some outside sense. What I think Emerson is saying is that story/plot is just one element of the whole thing of film, and it needs to work with everything else to count as “good” on its own.
There’s an extra question: what do all those elements do for a film? My sense, and this is just a casual observation, ripe for later refinement, is that any narrative work of art is meant to impart a message or theme, suggest truths about human character, or instigate an emotion in the viewer. Obviously, most films do more than one of these things, but I’d suggest that theme-character-emotion is the “goal” of a film, and the eight elements are how that goal is achieved. Thinking critically about film isn’t really a matter of figuring out what a film is saying, but breaking down how it is saying. In other words, the “meaning” of a film has nothing to do with whether or not it’s “good” – a film is good if it imparts its meaning clearly through effective use of the language of cinema.
But I don’t mean to overreach: I’m here mostly to praise Emerson and his simple but effective attempt to knock the pegs out from under Story Above All. I should probably mention that, damn the publication stamp on this post (Blogger lets you pre-set publishing times now, very convenient), it’s very late and I’m very tired, and probably incoherent.