This chapter explains the way a film is made up, including its form and set of stylistic elements. Humans long for structure and form. Film is a unique medium that possesses its own form, which a viewer must understand in order to fully enjoy and evaluate it. Just as we perceive and understand a novel differently than we would a painting, the visual and aural cues we receive from a film help us to read it as a text. To understand how a film's form operates, the viewer needs to analyze it in terms of function, similarity and repetition, difference and variation, development, and unity/disunity.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to understand:

1. Form is a system of overall relations that can be perceived among the elements of the whole film. These include narrative (or nonnarrative) and stylistic elements. Form and content are often very closely linked and reinforce one another in film.
   
   
2. Audience expectations lead to an understanding of film organization. Suspense and surprise arise when audience expectations are not met as anticipated. Our expectations are formed by relating the situations and characters we see on screen to our own experiences. We feel suspense, surprise, shock, and humor when our expectations are not met as anticipated.
   
   
3. Emotions represented within the film interact as parts of the film's total system. It is first and foremost the dynamic aspect of form that engages spectator feelings. While our experiences play a large part in the way emotions portrayed in films affect us, the way these feelings interact with one another within the film and its story can change our typical reactions to certain events.
   
   
4. A film's form has four types of meaning: referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic. Films have meaning because audience members attribute meanings to them. We evaluate (assign a value to) film based on a number of criteria. Sometimes the real challenge is to minimalize evaluation and simply look for the merits of a film.
   
   
5. There are no absolute principles of form, which films must follow. Similarly, there is no specific set of criteria for evaluating a film. Some of the basic components of a film language (which combine to make form) include similarity and repetition, difference and variation, development, and unity/disunity.