What is the meaning of this?

Living in a modern culture, surrounded by images, we often take for granted the basic cues that allow us to read a story without further explanation. We understand that when a person walks off screen that they haven't disappeared, they are just off camera, or the scene has shifted focus to another character. But if you show that to a primitive audience that has never seen a film, they might go looking around behind the screen to see where that person has gone. They don't grasp this simple concept because their eye has not be trained like ours has.

When the concepts become more complex and involved, we must examine things more closely to determine what the filmmaker is trying to say through the elements that they place on screen. We are often given subtle visual or auditory cues, from the use of certain colors and locations to music and sound effects. We must draw conclusions based upon an entire set of elements that make up the scene. 

David Bordwell tackles the subject of film form and the meanings that are created through it in the second chapter of his book Film Art. Bordwell is systematic in his approach, which is useful for a topic that is often so subjective. That is not to say that the meaning of certain elements within a film can always be neatly categorized, but he offers a framework to help do this.

He breaks up meaning into four different areas: referential, that is people, places, and events that most people are aware of in order to give a context to the story, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic, which takes explicit meaning and applies it to a broader set of values that are characteristic of a whole society. He also gets into motivation, which meaning also depends on. What is the reason for certain elements being used within the scene? This gets at the way a scene is staged, in terms of the lighting, the color scheme, the costumes as well as camera placement, among other things. At times the characters movement within the scene motivates where the camera will be placed and how it will move within the scene.

Bordwell also touches on two other essential elements in film. He discusses the use of motifs, which rely on repeated elements to create a consistent theme throughout a film that tie the narrative together. He also gets into what he refers to as parallelism, which involves the use of multiple storylines that are connected by common elements. He cites The Wizard of Oz frequently in the text. It is a perfect example of many of these attributes of film form. For instance, the way that the parallel stories that take place in Oz and Kansas play out by using the same actors to play parts in each one. Themes in one are reflected in the other. The film is rich with visual cues that offer us clues to the intended meaning of the film. Of course, these concepts can be applied to any film. Few are as rich with this use of overt visual symbols as The Wizard of Oz, and consequently we often must dig a little deeper to find the cues that offer some link to the intentions of the filmmaker.