Finding the relationship between latent form and character

Raymond Durgnat, in his essay ’The Mongrel Muse’, discusses an aspect of form which has interested many works of film criticism and theory: film as a composite medium, consisting of a number of expressive chains. Some of these chains (including the combinations of styles, tones, and genre signifiers) may be said to characterise artistic expression more generally. Some (including the simultaneous combinations of different artistic forms, levels of narration, and - fundamentally - images and sounds in montage) may be seen as more quintessentially ’cinematic’.2 Criticism has regularly returned to a discussion of narrative film’s development of a series of conventions which collectively strive to overcome the risk of fragmentation implicit in this chain-structure by engendering, instead, a sense of continuity