In film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, film grammar is defined

Definition

A definition is a passage that explains the meaning of a term , or a type of thing. The term to be defined is the definiendum. A term may have many different senses or meanings...

 as follows:

1. A frame
   Film frame
   In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture...
   
    is a single still image. It is analogous
   Analogy
   Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
   
    to a letter
   Letter (alphabet)
   A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
   
   .
2. A shot is a single continuous recording
   Recording
   Recording is the process of capturing data or translating information to a recording format stored on some storage medium, which is often referred to as a record or, if an auditory medium, a recording....
   
    made by a camera
   Camera
   A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...
   
   . It is analogous
   Analogy
   Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
   
    to a word
   Word
   In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
   
   .
3. A scene is a series of related shots. It is analogous to a sentence
   Sentence (linguistics)
   In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
   
   . The study of transitions between scenes is described in film punctuation
   Film punctuation
   A film transition is a technique used in the post-production process of film editing and video editing by which scenes or shots are combined. Most commonly this is through a normal cut to the next scene. Most films will also include selective use of other transitions, usually to convey a tone or...
   
   .
4. A sequence is a series of scenes which together tell a major part of an entire story
   Narrative
   A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
   
   , such as that contained in a complete movie
   Film
   A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
   
   . It is analogous to a paragraph
   Paragraph
   A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented...
   
   .

The term film grammar is best understood as a creative metaphor, since the elements of film grammar described above do not stand in any strict relation of analogy to the components of grammar as understood by philology or modern linguistics.

D. W. Griffith

D. W. Griffith

David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...

 has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting

Cross-cutting

Cross-cutting is an editing technique most often used in films to establish action occurring at the same time in two different locations. In a cross-cut, the camera will cut away from one action to another action, which can suggest the simultaneity of these two actions but this is not always the...

"—using film editing

Film editing

Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...

 to alternate between different events occurring at the same time—in order to build suspense

Suspense

Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...

. He still used many elements from the "primitive" style of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood

Classical Hollywood cinema

Classical Hollywood cinema or the classical Hollywood narrative, are terms used in film history which designates both a visual and sound style for making motion pictures and a mode of production used in the American film industry between roughly the 1910s and the early 1960s.Classical style is...

's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shot

Point of view shot

A point of view shot is a short film scene that shows what a character is looking at . It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction...

s. Some claim, too, that he "invented" the close-up

Close-up

In filmmaking, television production, still photography and the comic strip medium a close-up tightly frames a person or an object. Close-ups are one of the standard shots used regularly with medium shots and long shots . Close-ups display the most detail, but they do not include the broader scene...

 shot.

Credit for Griffith's cinematic innovations must be shared with his cameraman of many years, Billy Bitzer

Billy Bitzer

Gottfried Wilhelm "Billy" Bitzer was a pioneering cinematographer notable for his close association with D. W. Griffith....

. In addition, he himself credited the legendary silent star Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish

Lillian Diana Gish was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987....

, who appeared in several of his films, with creating a new style of acting for the cinema.

See also

• Grammar
  Grammar
  In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
  
  
• The 'Grammar' of Television and Film http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/gramtv.html