Concepts

Film-language ideas — the codes and conventions, plus the theory underneath them. Each maps back to its Axis of Action category.

• Acting Performance as a symbolic code: face, voice, body and the gap between what is said and what is shown.
• Audio Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence — and the line between sound the characters share and sound they can't hear.
• Camerawork Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
• Character How films build people: introduction, goal, flaw, change — and the machinery of sympathy.
• Chronology The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.
• Colour Palette as meaning: what the frame's colours claim before the story does.
• Conflict The engine: who wants what, what stands in the way, and on how many fronts at once.
• Continuity The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.
• Editing The join between shots: cinema's only invisible code, until it decides to be seen.
• Format The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.
• Formula The genre convention of expected shape: the plot beats a genre's audience arrives already knowing.
• Iconography The genre convention of recognisable things: objects, costumes, spaces and images that carry a genre's memory.
• Lighting Light as language: key, fill, shadow, and who the film chooses to illuminate.
• Mise en scène Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.
• Montage Meaning made between shots, not within them. The editing code at its most assertive.
• Non-diegetic sound Sound the characters can't hear. The audio code's licence to address the audience directly.
• Point of view Whose experience organises the narrative — and how films reassign it without telling you.
• Printed language Words the audience reads: titles, captions, signs, headlines, credits — the written code inside the frame.
• Setting Where and when. The symbolic code that answers the first question a frame gets asked.
• Spoken language Dialogue, voice-over, accent and idiom — what is said, how, and what the saying conceals.
• Structure The architecture of the telling: acts, setups, payoffs, and the contract a shape makes with its audience.
• The camera as voyeur The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.
• The MacGuffin The thing the characters care about and the film doesn't. Hitchcock's name for a structural decoy.
• Themes The genre convention of recurring meaning: the questions a genre exists to keep asking.