Film and Visual Communication III: Visual Communication and Visual Analysis; the Basics of Film Language and Aesthetics; the Dominant Film Paradigm; and Indian Aesthetics and Poetics — the Theories of Rasa and Dhvani

Visual analysis applies these tools systematically. Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies (2001) organises it around three sites where meaning is made, the production of an image, the image itself, and its audiencing, each with technological, compositional and social aspects; methods include compositional interpretation, content analysis (counting what appears across many images), semiology, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis. Kress and van Leeuwen's grammar supplies precise terms for composition and address, summarised below, and in practice an analyst reads an image for its salience (what draws the eye first), vectors (lines of gaze and movement), framing, colour, the relation of text and image, and the social relation the image sets up with the viewer.

Film language has four main dimensions. Mise-en-scène, "putting into the scene", covers everything placed before the camera: setting, props, costume, make-up, lighting and performance. Lighting may be high-key (bright, even, with few shadows, as in comedies and musicals) or low-key (strong shadows and contrast, as in film noir and horror), usually built from the key, fill and back lights of three-point lighting (Chapter 15). Cinematography covers shot scale, angle, movement, lens and depth of field: deep focus, which keeps foreground and background sharp at once, was made famous by Gregg Toland's camerawork in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). Editing joins shots: the continuity system uses the establishing shot, shot/reverse-shot, eyeline match, match on action and the 180-degree rule to make cuts unnoticeable; cross-cutting or parallel editing, developed by D. W. Griffith in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), alternates between simultaneous actions; montage builds meaning by juxtaposition; and the jump cut, made famous by Godard's Breathless, breaks continuity deliberately. Sound is diegetic when its source is in the story world (dialogue, a radio in the scene) and non-diegetic when it is not (background score, a narrator's voice-over).

Film aesthetics asks what makes film expressive and valuable. The debate between formalism and realism set out in Chapter 19, between Eisenstein's montage and Bazin's long take, is the classic frame; neoformalist critics such as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, in Film Art, analyse how form and style shape a viewer's experience. The aesthetic choices of a film, its lighting, colour palette, framing, rhythm of editing and use of music, are how it creates mood and meaning, which is why film analysis attends to form as closely as to story.

The dominant film paradigm is classical Hollywood cinema, analysed by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985). Its narrative centres on a psychologically defined protagonist pursuing a clear goal against obstacles; events are linked in a tight chain of cause and effect; time and space serve the story; editing is "invisible", following the continuity rules so that the viewer attends to the story rather than the cut; and the ending closes the plot. Screenwriting manuals codified it as a three-act structure of set-up, confrontation and resolution, as in Syd Field's Screenplay (1979). Its industrial base was the studio system of the 1920s to 1950s, with vertically integrated studios, genres and stars, weakened after the Paramount decision of 1948 separated production from exhibition.

Indian popular cinema departs from this paradigm in ways that are features, not faults. The song-and-dance sequence suspends the causal chain; the interval divides the film into two halves with different rhythms; the masala film mixes genres and moods in one programme rather than keeping to one; melodrama externalises emotion; and scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Ravi Vasudevan have noted a frontal, iconic address, related to the devotional practice of darshan, in which characters are presented to be looked at and venerated. Reading such films only against the Hollywood model makes them look loose; the classical Indian theory of rasa, in which a performance is judged by the range and blend of emotions it lets the spectator savour, explains them better.

The theory of rasa comes from Bharata's Natyashastra, a treatise on drama, dance and music whose date is uncertain and is usually placed around the beginning of the Common Era. Its rasa-sutra states that rasa arises from the combination of vibhavas (determinants: the object that arouses an emotion and the circumstances that intensify it), anubhavas (consequents: the physical expressions of emotion) and vyabhicharibhavas (transitory states, of which Bharata lists thirty-three). Underlying each rasa is a permanent emotional state, the sthayibhava. Bharata named eight rasas; a ninth, shanta (peace), was accepted by later theorists and defended by Abhinavagupta.

Commentators disagreed about where rasa is located. Bhatta Lollata held that it is produced (utpatti) in the original character and, by extension, the actor; Shri Shankuka that the spectator infers (anumiti) it from the actor's imitation; Bhatta Nayaka that it is enjoyed (bhukti) by the spectator through a process of generalisation, sadharanikarana, in which the emotion is freed from personal reference; and Abhinavagupta, in his commentary the Abhinavabharati, that rasa is manifested or revealed (abhivyakti) in the consciousness of the sensitive spectator, the sahridaya, as an impersonal, blissful relish. Abhinavagupta's view became standard.

The theory of dhvani, suggestion, was set out by Anandavardhana in the Dhvanyaloka, written in Kashmir in the ninth century, which declares that dhvani is the soul of poetry. Words have three powers: abhidha, the primary, literal meaning; lakshana, a secondary meaning indicated when the literal one does not fit ("a village on the Ganga" meaning on its bank); and vyanjana, suggestion, a further meaning evoked beyond both. Anandavardhana distinguished three kinds of dhvani: vastu-dhvani, the suggestion of an idea or fact; alankara-dhvani, the suggestion of a figure of speech; and rasa-dhvani, the suggestion of emotion, which he held to be the highest, since emotion can never be stated directly without losing its force. Abhinavagupta's commentary on the Dhvanyaloka, the Locana, joined dhvani to rasa. For film and media the two theories are practical tools: a masala film can be read as a planned sequence of rasas, a song sequence as rasa-dhvani that suggests an emotion the dialogue does not state, and dhvani offers an Indian counterpart to Barthes's connotation, the meaning that lies beyond what is shown.