Formalism of film

The theory of film formalism prevailed in two historical periods. The first time occurred between 1920 and 1935. Scholars have found that movies (especially silent movies) are not only an important sociological phenomenon, but also a brand-new and powerful art form. The second wave of upsurge occurred in the early 1960s, benefiting from the rising academic upsurge of film, and it is still developing continuously.

Film formalism pays attention to the artistic treatment of composition, photography, lighting, editing, sound, color and performance, and emphasizes the "unnatural" degree of the film. Formalism pays too much attention to the skill level of film, establishes the grammar of visual language, and pays attention to the visibility of film language, while paying too much attention to formalism will limit the creativity of artists and the form of film itself and tend to be technical.

Russian formalism movement (19 18- 1930) happened to be the golden age of film formalism theory, which provided it with a profound philosophical background and developed a set of theories about human behavior, holding that practice, theory, symbols and aesthetics are the four major functions of human behavior. Formalist film theorists believe that if the film is completely used to reproduce reality, then it only plays a symbolic role. To make movies have aesthetic function, we must use special methods (unnatural skills) to deal with reality.

Formalists tend to like works with fancy techniques and think they are more artistic than works without traces. Generally speaking, formalism is more like a theory of an artistic style than a philosophical system that adapts to and judges all artistic styles. Now, let's look at some of the most interesting and valuable theorists in the formalism camp and their views.

Hugo munsterberg (hugo munsterberg)

On 19 16, Hugo Munster Berg wrote the film: Psychological Research. He has made remarkable achievements in film aesthetics and psychology. Later generations respected him as the ancestor of modern psychology, and his achievements in philosophy were even more remarkable.

Hugo munsterberg divided the film history into two stages: the external stage determined by technological development and the internal stage of the evolution of social application mode. Media technology provides the body, society gives life and makes it realize some practical activities. Technology realizes images, while psychological needs promote its functions in information, education and entertainment. From the beginning, the film is a juggling visual device, which has developed into a tool to provide education and information, and finally acts on people's minds through narration. Hugo munsterberg believes that only when the film is narrated can its artistic miracle appear, so the film is the art of the mind, and he understands all its features as psychological functions.

The mind can not only organize sports, but also organize events through attention, so movies are not only a record of sports, but also a systematic record of how the mind creates events. The organization of attention to simple feelings and actions is like the recording of composition, shooting angle and focal length.

Memory and imagination are higher-level psychological work. Compared with "attention" only creating events, memory and imagination produce meaning, conflict and personal pleasure. According to Hugo munsterberg, various editing methods of movies correspond to higher psychological functions, which give dramatic meaning and structure to performances and camera movements.

Emotion is the highest level of psychological activity, and corresponding to emotion is story, which is the most valuable part of film narrative art and also dominates the process of other levels of film. So hugo munsterberg put forward the metaphor of film material-different levels of psychological activities.

Different shooting angles, composition, picture size and light attract people's selective attention, and the brain processes these continuous pictures to produce motion illusion; Editing creates rhythms, flashbacks or dreams by compressing or expanding time, and forms the audience's memory or imagination. The main purpose of the film is to create emotion, which is psychology rather than external media, and its foundation is the psychological world of the subject.

Rudolph arnheim

Rudolf Einheim's Film as Art was published in 1932, which is almost the same as hugo munsterberg's theory, but it has a wider influence and aroused people's interest. He comes from Gestalt Psychology School (emphasizing that the whole is not the sum of parts and consciousness is not the sum of feelings), and thinks that only the artistic form of the film (rather than what it records) is within his discussion scope.

Rudolph Einheim believes that movies are not a medium to express reality, not a conscious use of external things (such as sounds and gestures), but a conscious use of the way we present the world. Film art is the product of tension between reproduction and deformation, and its aesthetic basis is not what the world has already presented, but the aesthetic application of things or methods that present the world. Therefore, Rudolf Einheim thinks that realistic film technology should be restrained and artistic expression should be chosen.

Every time natural perception is restricted, the potential aesthetic feeling will increase by one point. Rudolf Einheim endowed the aesthetic feeling of movies with attributes unrelated to natural perception-upgrading and degradation, fading in and out, dissolution, overprint, freeze-frame, inversion, scaling and deformation caused by filters. For him, the artistic process is a model of emotional activities. The artist properly handled the stimulation of the external world, and then successfully expressed the state of himself and the external world when the two forces reached a balance.

Artists get primitive stimuli from the outside world, regard them as objects and events, and then project these things into an imaginary form and return them to the outside world. Then the outside world reacts and forces the artist to modify its form until both the artist and the outside world are satisfied. In this way, art expresses the artist and the outside world.

Sergei Eisenstein (Sergei Eisenstein).

Sergei Eisenstein's views on movies are richer and more complicated. In his film creation, he emphasized "shock" and "attraction" as the material of the film, and thought that the film creator could determine the psychological process of the audience by accurately calculating the structure of attraction. Sergei Eisenstein's attitude towards montage has undergone many dramatic changes, from the position of association to developmental psychology. He sometimes regards movies as machines, sometimes as organisms, sometimes as powerful rhetorical persuasion tools, and sometimes as mysterious ways to understand the universe.

Sergei Eisenstein believes that movies should decompose reality into different materials (this process can be called "neutralization"), and then use them to create new and higher-level ideograms. The shock of enjoying a movie should not only come from the story itself, but a series of shocks created by each element in each scene.

Combining different conflicts, Sergei Eisenstein created different concepts of montage, and montage directed different elements to form the call of movies. He regards the viewing experience as a self-centered activity, and the audience regards the images on the screen as the display of their pre-cognitive experience.

The main functions of element neutralization are empathy and synaesthesia. Through empathy, the combination of many different elements may produce new effects. There are often many elements appearing on the screen at the same time in movies. They may complement each other, enhance the effect, or conflict with each other to produce new effects, or use unexpected elements to produce the desired effects. The latter is the highest state of empathy.

Bela Balazs (Bella)

Film aesthetics is an important work of Bela Balazs, who believes that film art can only develop if economic conditions permit. Film is a process of artistic creation, and the material is not reality itself, but a "film theme" that conforms to people's experience and can be transformed into a film. Art can never capture the truth itself. It deals with reality in its own way, and endows the objective world with the unique form and significance of human beings. Bela Balazs attaches great importance to the choice of film themes, and suggests that it is better to adapt ordinary works, so that it is easier to adapt them into successful films. At the same time, he also believes that only those with talent and vitality can grasp the film material from experience, instead of being readily available to everyone, as most theorists believe.

Bela Balazs supports new technologies, but insists that these inventions must be used to strengthen form rather than realism. Images are the construction of human beings, and should not be used to express the truth, but to criticize or respond to the truth, and the usual methods of movies are naturally related to human psychological processes. However, he is not so obsessed with pure form. He often criticizes films that are excessively deformed. He hopes to enhance the meaning of things through film technology, while retaining the state of things themselves.

Good editing can arouse our association and give it a clear direction. In this kind of films, we can see the internal association process running in people's ideology.

We can see that film formalism advocates paying attention to the artistic skills and expression of movies, and tends to put the "highly visual" style above the naturalistic style. However, although most formalists agree with this view, people have been trying to avoid this tendency of oversimplification since the first group of theorists.

References:

Introduction to classic film theory

By the nosy Andrew

Translated by Li Weifeng