Form Is Content

All great works of art give lie to the distinction between form and content. Form and content are not separate entities but two expressions of the same thing. This inextricable link, this indissociable bond, is most easily illustrated in painting. When we look at, for example, Van Gogh’s The Sower or Starry Night no one makes the argument that what is great about these paintings is the “content.” Or, if they do, they don’t mean by content “a sower at dusk” or “a star-filled night.” What is miraculous about these works is the painter’s dazzling use of color, as well as the way he manages to impress upon us his individual perspective on the world – the way he communicates the sensation of color and light. The “content” of these works is color, light, perspective, which is also what we would discuss if we were considering its “form.”

This seems straightforward enough, does it not? The same argument can be made about literature. The use of long-winding sentences in Proust, some of which extend for more than a page, is not a gratuitous addition to the “content” of In Search of Lost Time but an essential component through which the novelist communicates ideas and emotions. (If a no-nonsense translator decided to “simplify” Proust and correct the novelist’s tendency to embed subclauses within subclauses, you would any up with a book that had little to do with Proust. You’d write In Search of Lost Time without Proust.) This is why the adaptation of a great work of literature into a film is a perilous task. As Truffaut once said to Hitchcock, a great work of art is one that has already found its perfect form, and for this reason it cannot be “translated” into another medium without extraordinary difficulty. (On the other hand, a second- or third-rate novel might be ideal material to adapt to the screen, precisely because it has yet to be fully realized. It remains in chrysalis form, awaiting perfection.)

When we talk of cinema too often people assume that the “content” is the story or the plot (i.e., what is in the script), and form is merely a way of embellishing content through the use of a number of stylistic flourishes: a 360º pan, a crane shot which descends from the clouds, a fancy Steadicam shot, etc. It is a common belief, and it results in nothing but mediocre works. In a great film, form is content: the form in which the filmmaker tells a story and through which the viewer experiences the film is what makes it memorable; indeed, it is what makes it unique, one of a kind. A director’s job is to discover, in the translation of a script into a film, the correct way to give life – to embody – the ideas and emotions that remain only half-realized (chrysalis-like) on the written page. (As Godard once said, if you write a script that is so good that readers laugh and cry when reading it, then you should just bind the script and sell it in a store. Your work is complete. A script does not need to do all these things because this is not its purpose.) So a film is not its script, and the form through which a film comes into being is not extrinsic to its content – it is its content.

S I-G