concept

Format

The shape of the product itself: medium, runtime, ratio, episode or feature — conventions that precede the first frame.

form conventions
reference
form-convention

Format is the container a film arrives in, decided before any creative choice is made inside it: the shape of the frame, the length of the whole, the medium, the screen it is built for. Students treat these as neutral facts. They are not. A ratio decides what a composition can hold, and a running time decides what a structure can afford. The interesting question about both is whether they are constraints the filmmaker works within or meanings the filmmaker works with. The library divides on this.

Constraint or meaning

Bordwell and Thompson treat format as a history of standards. The Academy ratio of 1.37:1 was set "to allow room for a soundtrack", widescreen norms arrived in the 1950s, and what interests them is adaptation: "Every change in technology and exhibition has forced filmmakers to make tough choices." Running time gets the same treatment, the eleven-minute reel that forced the cuts in Rope, and a filmmaker who "may exploit every moment of the film's running time". Format is the field of play.

Giannetti wants the ratio to mean something. Following Bazin, he treats widescreen as a realist argument: it "tends to de-emphasize depth in favor of breadth", and a horizontal presentation "could be more democratic" than the close-up and the edited sequence. The wide frame is a position on how much a viewer should be told where to look.

Boggs takes a third line: the format is the work and altering it is damage. Cropping a widescreen film for a square television is "cinematic mutilation", because the process "introduced camera movement not intended by the film's creators". Three positions, three questions: what did the format allow, what did it claim, and what happened to the film when the format changed under it.

On the bench

Psycho (1960) is where format is most visibly a production decision. It was shot fast, in black and white, by the television crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, on a TV-unit budget. Its running time is then made a contract. Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy records that cinemas could admit nobody after the start, because a structure built on Killing the protagonist at minute 47 does not survive an audience that wanders in at minute fifty. Hitchcock priced the running time into the release.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) has the strangest format afterlife in the wiki. A profane New Hollywood feature became Alice (CBS, 1976–85), a laugh-tracked sitcom: the same diner in a different container, and the meaning inverted. Alice — the prologue adds a smaller point, a feature that opens by counterfeiting the look of a studio-era women's picture, so the container is the first thing the film quotes.

What to look for

What is the aspect ratio, and what sits at the edges of the frame that a narrower ratio would lose?
What does the running time permit or forbid? Where would the film break if half an hour shorter?
Was the film built for the screen you are watching it on? If not, what has been cropped or letterboxed?
Has the story lived in another container, and what changed with the shape?

In the books

The ratio of frame width to frame height is called the aspect ratio.

— Film Art, fa 181

Every change in technology and exhibition has forced filmmakers to make tough choices.

— Film Art, fa 46

Widescreen tends to de-emphasize depth in favor of breadth, but Bazin believed that a horizontal presentation of the visual materials could be more democratic

— Giannetti, um 182

The process frequently introduced camera movement not intended by the film's creators and thereby could alter significantly the visual rhythms of the film.

— Boggs, awf 13

Deepest on this in the library

Measured across the 72 books indexed in Reel — how much denser each one is on this concept than the library average. A place to read next, not a claim about quality.

9× Henry Jenkins — Textual Poachers 165 passages · cite as tp
2.4× Staiger & Hake — Convergence Media History 37 passages · cite as cmh
2.3× David Morley — Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies 53 passages · cite as tacs
2.2× Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese 107 passages · cite as smc
2× Donna Kornhaber — Wes Anderson 22 passages · cite as wak
1.8× Justus Nieland — David Lynch 25 passages · cite as dl

Go on, then

concept Continuity The form convention that makes cuts invisible: the 180° system, matches, and the grammar audiences never notice learning.
source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
context Control The institutional context: censorship, classification, editorial power, gatekeeping — who may say what, to whom.
source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.
source O'Shaughnessy, Stadler & Casey — Media & Society The Australian media studies textbook. The closest thing on the shelf to the wiki's own framework, in a VCE-shaped vocabulary.