Formalism in Film: Key Concepts, Theory, and Analysis

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Published: March 2, 2026 | Last Updated: March 5, 2026

Overview

Formalist film theory starts with a far-reaching claim: what makes cinema meaningful is not its subject matter, but how that subject matter is presented. The theory directs attention away from story content and toward the techniques filmmakers use to construct meaning: montage (starting with the Soviet montage theory movement), camera angle, framing, lighting, sound design, and the rhythm of editing. In this view, form is not decoration. It is the primary carrier of meaning.

You encounter formalism in two distinct but connected traditions. The first is the classical formalism of the Soviet silent cinema period (1920s), where directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov developed theories of film construction through both practice and writing. The second is neo-formalism, associated with film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, which refined those earlier ideas into a systematic analytical framework still widely used in film studies today.

Formalism is also one side of one of film theory’s most productive disputes: the debate with realism, particularly the contrast between Eisenstein’s montage theory and André Bazin’s defense of the long take and deep focus. Understanding formalism means understanding that debate as well.

Historical Background

Formalist ideas about film emerged in two places almost simultaneously in the 1920s: among Soviet filmmakers and theorists working in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and among European intellectuals drawing on the methods of literary formalism and Gestalt psychology.

The Russian Formalists, a group of literary scholars including Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary theorist and critic, and Boris Eichenbaum, a literary scholar associated with the Petersburg OPOYAZ group, developed concepts in the 1910s and 1920s that would become foundational for later film theory. Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie, usually translated as “defamiliarization,” argued that art works by making familiar things strange and forcing the perceiver to slow down and notice what habit has made invisible. Eichenbaum was among the first to ask what a specifically cinematic “language” might consist of. He distinguished between the raw material that enters a film and the formal system that organizes it into meaning.

At roughly the same time, Soviet filmmakers were conducting systematic experiments in the editing room. Lev Kuleshov, a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, demonstrated through controlled experiments that the meaning of a shot is not fixed but relational: the same image of an actor’s impassive face produces entirely different readings depending on what shot precedes it. This became known as the Kuleshov effect, and it established editing as the central object of Soviet film theory.

Soviet Montage Theory

Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker and theorist whose essays remained foundational throughout the twentieth century, took Kuleshov’s insight further. Where Kuleshov saw editing as assembly, Eisenstein theorized it as collision. His concept of intellectual montage held that placing two shots in sequence produces a third, conceptual meaning that exists in neither shot individually. Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927) put this theory directly into practice. Eisenstein’s essays, collected in Film Form (1949) and The Film Sense (1942), gave these ideas systematic theoretical form.

Vsevolod Pudovkin, another Soviet filmmaker of the same period, developed a parallel theory that emphasized editing as a relational chain: each cut builds on the last and guides the viewer’s attention through space and time. Dziga Vertov, a Soviet documentary filmmaker and theorist, took a different path entirely. His kino-eye theory rejected theatrical fiction films and sought to reveal the hidden formal structure of observable reality through camera work and editing. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) remains its most complete expression.

Formalism outside the Soviet Union

Outside the Soviet Union, Rudolf Arnheim, a German-American perceptual psychologist and art theorist, published Film as Art in 1932. Arnheim argued that film’s deviations from ordinary perception (its two-dimensionality, its lack of depth cues, its absence of color in the silent era) were not deficiencies but artistic resources. The constraints of the medium, he argued, are what make cinematic art possible. Béla Balázs, a Hungarian film critic and theorist, focused on the expressive potential of the close-up and the physiognomy of the human face. Balázs argued that cinema had restored a dimension of visible, embodied meaning that print culture had suppressed.

A second wave of formalist thinking emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, associated in particular with Noël Burch, a film theorist and critic who trained in France. His Theory of Film Practice (1973) described cinema as a system of parameters (fifteen variables of film form, including editing rhythm, spatial orientation, and sound-image relationships) that a director can systematically manipulate. This framework influenced both avant-garde filmmaking and academic analysis.

Neo-formalism

The most methodologically rigorous development came with neo-formalism, associated with David Bordwell, an American film scholar, and Kristin Thompson, a film historian, from the late 1970s onward.

Drawing on the Russian Formalists, cognitive psychology, and classical film theory, they proposed an analytical framework centered on the distinction between fabula (the story as reconstructed by the viewer: the sequence of events in chronological order) and syuzhet (the plot as presented: the specific order, duration, and frequency with which story events appear in the film).

Their work, notably Thompson’s Breaking the Glass Armor (1988) and Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), brought formalist analysis into the mainstream of English-language film scholarship.

Core Mechanism: How Formalist Analysis Works

Formalist analysis proceeds from a set of shared assumptions: that films are made objects, that their formal properties can be described systematically, and that those properties are the primary evidence for any interpretive claim. The analyst’s job is to identify the film’s system of devices and explain how that system produces its effects.

Identify the formalist device

The most basic analytical move is the identification of a device. A device is any formal technique a film employs: a specific cutting rhythm, a recurring camera angle, a pattern of color or light, a relationship between dialogue and image. Devices are observable and describable.

The analyst first notices that something recurs across a film (a particular framing of a character, a sound motif, a pattern of scene transitions) and then asks what work that device is doing in the film’s overall system.

Fabula vs Syuzhet

The distinction between fabula and syuzhet is central to neo-formalist analysis. Consider a film that opens with a character running from an unknown threat. The viewer begins constructing the fabula (what actually happened, in what order) even as the syuzhet withholds or delays crucial information. The gap between what the plot reveals and what the story must logically contain creates suspense, curiosity, and surprise.

A formalist analyst traces how the syuzhet manages this gap: which information is given early, which is suppressed, and how formal techniques like cinematography and editing support or complicate the viewer’s hypotheses.

Motivation as an analytical tool

A second key analytical category is motivation. Formalists distinguish between compositional motivation (a formal element is justified by the needs of the narrative), realistic motivation (an element is justified by its plausibility in the film’s world), generic motivation (an element is justified by genre conventions), and artistic motivation (an element draws attention to itself as form, beyond narrative function).

Identifying which type of motivation governs a given device allows the analyst to place it within the film’s formal economy and to notice when a device exceeds its narrative justification and becomes visible as form.

Eisensteinian formalism

Eisensteinian formalism adds a third category of analysis: the typology of montage. Eisenstein distinguished metric montage (cuts governed by mathematical intervals), rhythmic montage (cuts that respond to movement within the frame), tonal montage (cuts that respond to emotional or atmospheric tone), and intellectual montage (cuts that produce abstract ideas through juxtaposition).

Analyzing a sequence through this framework means identifying which of these types governs the editing and tracing the specific effect each type produces on the viewer’s perceptual and cognitive processing.

What to Look For: A Formalist Checklist

When applying formalist analysis to a film or sequence, it helps to work through each dimension of film form systematically. The goal is not to list techniques but to trace how they interact to produce a specific effect. Start with one device, describe it precisely, then ask how it connects to others in the film’s larger system.

• Editing rhythm and pattern: How long are individual shots? Does cutting accelerate, slow, or maintain a consistent pace? Are cuts motivated by movement, dialogue, or something more abstract?
• Camera distance and angle: Are characters filmed in close-up, medium shot, or long shot? Does the camera angle reinforce or complicate the scene’s apparent meaning?
• Spatial construction: How is the scene’s space established and maintained? Is it continuous, fragmented, or deliberately disorienting?
• Sound-image relationship: Does the soundtrack reinforce the image, contradict it, or operate independently? Is silence used as a formal device?
• Fabula/syuzhet gap: What information does the plot withhold that the story logically requires? How does that gap generate suspense or surprise?
• Motivation: Can you identify whether each formal element is compositionally, realistically, generically, or artistically motivated?
• Repetition and variation: Does a device recur across the film? If so, does it carry consistent meaning, or does its significance shift through variation?

Once you have described a set of devices and their interaction, the analytical step is to ask what system they form. A formalist reading does not interpret devices one by one in isolation. It traces how the film’s formal choices create a coherent or deliberately incoherent whole. The interpretation follows from the formal description, not the other way around.

Micro-Analysis: The Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin

The Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) remains one of the most analyzed passages in film history. It runs approximately seven minutes and depicts Tsarist soldiers shooting down civilians on the stone steps leading to Odessa harbor. What makes it a formalist text is the way Eisenstein systematically violates conventional spatial and temporal continuity to produce specific perceptual and emotional effects.

The sequence does not follow the steps as a single, coherent space. Shots approach from different angles, reverse spatial logic, and collapse into close-ups that make it impossible to track individual figures through the geography. The crowd’s movement downward is interrupted by the soldiers’ advance from above, but the spatial relationship between these two lines of movement is never firmly established.

Eisenstein uses this spatial ambiguity deliberately: the viewer cannot locate themselves in the space because the sequence is not trying to represent a coherent space. It is constructing an experience of overwhelming force and collective trauma through formal means.

The editing tempo rises as the sequence intensifies. Individual shots become shorter as the violence escalates, creating a rhythmic acceleration that the viewer registers kinesthetically before processing it intellectually. Close-ups of faces (an old woman’s pince-nez glasses, a screaming mouth, a dead child) are cut against wider shots of the mass movement. The collision between the intimate and the collective is what generates the sequence’s central meaning. The famous unattended baby carriage, drifting down the steps while its mother dies, is held in longer takes than most other images; its sustained duration produces a different kind of temporal pressure than the rapid cutting surrounding it. Duration itself becomes a formal device.

This is precisely what Eisenstein meant by intellectual montage: the sequence does not describe the massacre as a recorded event. It constructs the massacre as an argument about Tsarist brutality, collective tragedy, and political power, through the systematic juxtaposition of images that carry limited meaning individually. The third meaning is produced by the cut.

Additional Film Examples

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) takes formalist self-consciousness to an extreme. The film documents a day in Soviet urban life while simultaneously showing the process of its own construction: the cameraman filming, the editor cutting, the audience watching.

Every formal device (split screens, freeze frames, reverse motion, extreme camera angles, superimpositions) is foregrounded as a device. The film refuses to let the viewer forget they are watching a constructed artifact. In Shklovsky’s terms, it defamiliarizes the act of viewing itself.

Micro-analysis of Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick, the American filmmaker known for meticulous formal control, made The Shining (1980), a film that rewards formalist analysis through its systematic use of spatial impossibility. The Overlook Hotel is laid out in ways that cannot correspond to a coherent architectural space: rooms whose windows look onto impossible interiors, corridors that could not connect given the floor plans established earlier.

This spatial incoherence is not a continuity error. It is a formal strategy that uses the constructed space of the mise-en-scène to produce a perceptual unease that precedes the film’s supernatural events. A viewer who tracks the film’s spatial logic against the architecture realizes that the hotel has never been a coherent space: the disorientation is built into the form from the start.

Chantal Akerman’s approach to formalist analysis

Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker and artist, used formalist techniques in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) to create a politically charged temporal experience. The film observes a widow’s domestic routine in near-real time, through long takes and a fixed, eye-level camera.

The formal strategy of duration, repetition, and frontality places the viewer inside the rhythm of domestic labor in a way that conventional edited cinema could not. When the film’s established routine is broken in the final act, the deviation from the formal system carries enormous weight precisely because that system has been so rigorously maintained. The meaning of the break comes from the form.

Common Misconceptions

The most persistent misconception about formalism is that it treats content as irrelevant, claiming the formalist critic cares only about technique and ignores what a film is about. This misreads the theory.

Formalism does not claim that a film’s subject matter is unimportant. It claims that subject matter is always organized through formal choices, and that understanding how it is organized is essential for any serious analysis. Eisenstein was not indifferent to the political content of Battleship Potemkin. He argued that the film’s revolutionary politics could only achieve their intended force through the systematic manipulation of editing.

Formalist theory isn’t just for avant-garde cinema

A second misconception is that formalist analysis applies only to formally experimental or avant-garde films. Neo-formalists like Bordwell and Thompson have demonstrated convincingly that formalist categories (fabula/syuzhet, motivation, device patterning) are just as applicable to mainstream Hollywood genre films as to Soviet montage cinema. The formal system of a conventional thriller is different from that of Man with a Movie Camera, but it is still a system, and analyzing it produces genuine insights into how the film achieves its effects.

Identifying a formal device does not equal interpretation

A third misconception is that identifying a formal device constitutes an interpretation. Description is not yet an analysis. Noting that Battleship Potemkin uses rapid editing does not explain anything until the analyst traces how that editing functions within the film’s overall system and relates it to the specific effects it produces. Formalist analysis requires the additional steps of explanation and motivation: the “how” and “why,” not just the “what.”

Key Debates and Scholarly Criticism

The most foundational debate in formalist film theory is its dispute with realism, particularly the arguments advanced by André Bazin, the French critic and co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma. Bazin argued that cinema’s essential property is its photographic indexicality: the camera records a mechanical impression of physical reality and gives film a privileged relationship to the real world that no other art form shares. Editing, in Bazin’s view, risks destroying this relationship by replacing the ambiguity of the recorded event with an interpretation imposed by the filmmaker. He preferred the long take and deep focus, which preserved spatial unity and allowed viewers to make their own perceptual choices within the frame. This placed him in direct opposition to Eisenstein’s claim that montage is cinema’s defining and most valuable technique. The debate remains productive today, even as most contemporary theorists treat it as a useful tension rather than a resolved argument.

A second major debate concerns the cognitive claims of neo-formalism. Bordwell’s framework assumes that viewers are active hypothesis-formers who construct meaning from the film’s cues in ways that are relatively stable across cultural contexts. Critics from cultural studies and Screen theory backgrounds have argued that this underestimates the role of ideology, gender, and cultural positioning in how viewers respond to formal cues. What neo-formalism treats as a universal cognitive process, these critics argue, is in fact a historically specific and culturally situated one. The viewer that Bordwell describes is implicitly positioned as white, male, and Western, a critique that echoes feminist and postcolonial challenges to spectatorship theory more broadly.

A third line of criticism, associated with theorists working in the tradition of Screen theory and psychoanalytic film theory, holds that formalism’s emphasis on cognitive activity brackets the unconscious dimensions of cinematic experience: the affective charge of images, the viewer’s identification with characters, the mobilization of desire and anxiety. A purely formalist account of the Odessa Steps sequence, these critics argue, cannot fully explain why the sequence is devastating rather than merely interesting. The emotional intensity exceeds what a description of editing patterns can account for on its own.

Quick Contrast: Formalism and Realism

Formalism and film realism define their central questions differently. Formalism asks how cinema manipulates its materials to produce meaning; realism asks how cinema reveals the world as it is. Their units of analysis reflect this difference. Formalism focuses on editing, rhythm, and formal construction; Bazinian realism focuses on the long take, the unbroken shot, and the spatial integrity of the profilmic event. Both use formal description as evidence, but they draw opposite conclusions: for the formalist, editing is cinema’s defining medium; for the realist, editing is at best a necessary technique and at worst a falsification of the profilmic event’s inherent ambiguity.

Why Formalism Still Matters

Formalism remains one of the most useful analytical frameworks in film studies because it is teachable, falsifiable, and applicable across a wide range of films and contexts. Its core analytical moves (identify the device, describe the system, explain the effect) provide a methodology that is both rigorous and open to revision. Unlike frameworks that require the analyst to accept a set of theoretical premises before proceeding, formalist analysis starts with what is observable on screen.

The framework has found renewed relevance in the context of digital cinema and platform distribution. Questions about how streaming formats affect editing rhythm, how algorithmic recommendations alter viewer expectations, and how digital effects change the viewer’s sense of cinematic space are all accessible through formalist categories. Bordwell and Thompson’s work on Hollywood storytelling has been extended to cover contemporary franchise filmmaking and the rise of serialized narrative forms, demonstrating that the analytical vocabulary holds even as the industrial context changes.

Formalism also serves as an important counterweight to purely ideological or content-based criticism. It insists that claims about what a film means must be grounded in claims about how it is made, a standard of evidence that keeps film analysis connected to the specific, material object of the film itself. Paired with feminist theory, it allows for precise description of the formal mechanisms through which a director’s choices construct gendered meaning. Paired with historical analysis, it provides a method for tracing how formal conventions develop and change over time.

Summing Up

Formalist film theory holds that meaning in cinema is constructed through form, specifically through the deliberate organization of editing, cinematography, sound, and space. Its origins lie in the Soviet filmmaking experiments of the 1920s and in the European film theory of the same period. Neo-formalism brought those insights into a systematic analytical framework centered on the distinction between fabula and syuzhet, the concept of the device, and the analysis of how formal systems produce perceptual and cognitive effects in the viewer. The theory’s limitations (its relative inattention to ideology, affect, and cultural positioning) have been productively challenged by feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies frameworks, but its core analytical vocabulary remains indispensable for anyone who wants to understand not just what a film is about, but how it achieves its effects.

References

• Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Balázs, Béla. 2010. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Edited by Erica Carter. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Burch, Noël. 1973. Theory of Film Practice. New York: Praeger.
• Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt.
• Pudovkin, Vsevolod. 1958. Film Technique and Film Acting. New York: Grove Press.
• Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 3–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Thompson, Kristin. 1988. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.