CHAPTER 3
The Visual Language and Aesthetics of Cinema
Film is a medium…. A medium is based on an agreement, a contract that has developed over a long period during which the speaker and the listener, the picture maker and the viewer, performer and audience, have established a system of meanings: a vocabulary, syntax and grammar of the language being used. For this reason, language emerges slowly, and will continue to evolve for as long as audiences and authors develop new ways of expressing themselves.
Alexander Mackendrick (From On Filmmaking, 2004)
There is a grammar of filmmaking, a basic grammar that you depart from. Always. And I think it’s important to learn the grammar first…. You can make your own rules, and you can break all the rules ...
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