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15
Matters of Content
THREE ASPECTS OF CONTENT
So much for story types according to form. Now I come to the issue of story content. Small wonder that this major issue has already been touched on* and that it has become evident that different kinds of content differ in their adequacy to the medium. So it may be taken for granted that the screen attracts certain types of content, while being unresponsive to others.
To begin with, let us distinguish between three aspects of content. There is, first, the content area. Does the story involve actual reality? Or does it belong to the realm of fantasy? After all that has been said before, the significance for photographic film of the area to which its material belongs is rather obvious. A second aspect of content bears on the subject matter of the story. People refer to this aspect when they say of a movie that it pictures a psychological conflict, a war adventure, a murder case, and the like, or simply define it in terms of some established genre, such as science-fiction, a Western, a musical, etc. Because of their dependence on changing social and historical circumstances, these subjects or topics elude systematic classification. Finally, content asserts itself in the form of motifs— salient story features which, it is true, materialize in the subject matter of the story but are by no means identical with it. Thus the guiding motif of a war film may be the concern for what happens to individuals in times of war; the preoccupation with the havoc wrought by war on whole populations; the glorification of heroism; a plea for mutual understanding between peoples; and so on.
The first of these aspects— content areas— has been discussed in chapter 5, where it was shown that, due to the medium's affinity for actual
* See pp. 209 ff., 237, 239 ff., and passim.
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