The Evolution of Film Language

In Bazin’s The Evolution of Film Language, the author talks in great detail about film language, starting with silent films. I enjoyed his his analysis of the two great opposing trends in film from 1920-1940: “those filmmakers who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality". It is an interesting way to look at filmmaking, and how much the filmmakers point of view shapes the story that we see. He then goes on to talk about evolution of technology in the film industry and how it affects pictures as a whole. He notes that the use of panchromatic filmstock, the microphone, and the use of a crane when shooting to be of chief significance in the evolution of film language at the time. What I found most interesting in this article was Bazin’s analysis of depth of field. Bazin believes that depth of field is not a camera technique, but a dialect advance in the history of film language. He goes on to describe depth of field’s affect on viewer, stating that it affects the structure of film language and the viewer’s intellectual relationship with the image. Before this class, I never really thought about the reasoning behind different prop placements in the films I watched. While I obviously know that everything has a specific placement for a specific reason, I never really stopped to think about how this placement affected my understanding of the image. Bazin puts it so eloquently though. He gives three general remarks about how depth of field creates a relationship between the viewer and the image. His first remark is about how depth of field helps create a more realistic image. Second, he talks about how as a result of the more realistic image, the viewer has a more active intellectual approach when watching the movie and is better able to make other connections, later on. Lastly, Bazin believes that depth of field allows for ambiguity into the structure of the image. While I never saw depth of field to be of chief importance before reading this article, I will now be on the lookout for it and am curious about how it will affect my relationship with the image.