Concepts
The film-language layer. Ten codes — the raw materials a film is made of — then three families of convention, which are the patterns audiences have learned to expect. Sub-concepts sit under the code they belong to. Each maps back to its Axis of Action category.
Codes
Performance as a symbolic code: who authors it, how the cut and the casting shape it, and why realism is the wrong yardstick.
Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence, and the argument over whether sound serves the image or works against it.
Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.
Light as language: key, fill and shadow, the moral vocabulary one textbook gives them and the grey scale another reduces them to.
Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.
Words the audience reads: titles, captions, signs, credits. Film Art calls them helpers; media studies calls them anchors.
Where and when, and the argument over whether a place expresses its people or acts on its own account.
Dialogue, voice-over, accent and idiom: the code the textbooks rank lowest and the sound mix ranks highest.
Form conventions
The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.
The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.
Story conventions
How a film builds a person out of traits, and whether it ever lets that person decide anything.
The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.
What stands between a character and what they want, and whether the film treats that as a device or as its subject.
Whose knowledge the narration is limited to, how deep it goes, and how films move it without saying so.
The shape of the telling, and whether that shape is a pattern the audience feels or a template the writer follows.
Hitchcock's name for the object the characters chase and the film forgets, and the argument over what its emptiness is for.
Genre conventions
The plot shape a genre's audience arrives already knowing, and the argument over whether repetition is commerce, ritual or both.
The objects, costumes and spaces a genre reuses until they carry its memory, and what that memory is worth.
The questions a genre keeps asking across decades, and whether its answers are a ritual the audience performs or a settlement it is sold.