A Comparative Study of Aristotelian Syllogism with Beginning Sequence of Five Classical Hollywood Films

This article studies five major classical Hollywood films: psycho, Casablanca, double indemnity, the apartment and the searchers and ratiocinates that in this era of cinema history, directors conform with a series of principles, procedures and protocols in order to start the films and also describes that these principles are based on philosophical theories of human minds ways of reasoning. This article argues that Hollywood studios utilized philosophy to develop a set of principles known as law of Ws. In this law W refers to four questions that should be answered in the beginning sequence and which are: where, when, who and what. This law committed directors to introduce four elements in the beginning sequence in order to orient the audience into the story. This article is to examine the philosophical value of this law with Aristotle’s views on inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. Aristotle is the first philosopher who organized logical concepts. He introduced two major methods of reasoning for human mind. First method is deductive reasoning. To reach a reliable conclusion, Deductive reasoning starts with a primary term and uses a secondary term which is smaller than the first one to provide the groundwork for achieving the result. In this way the results are the subset of the primary prelude, hence if the primary and the secondary terms are valid, the result would have no defects. The second method is conductive reasoning. On the other hand conductive reasoning starts with small logical terms and ends up with a general result that surpasses the enormity of the preliminary terms; hence the result may have some defects. Plan by plan analysis of the beginning sequence and sketching a plan-time diagram of all four elements of the law of Ws for the selected films shows a very interesting similarity. This diagram shows that in all five films four elements are introduced. Location is the first one then time of the event, the main character and the story of the film. Further analysis shows that the ways each element is introduced are the same in all five films. All diagrams for every film have a similar slope. It means that the size of the plans through time decreases. For introducing the location where the story is happening directors use a long shot of where it’s happening and step by step the size of the plan decreases to details of the location. For introducing the main character all directors start with a long shot of the character or in the case of the searchers with a very long shot of a man approaching a cottage in the middle of a desert. John ford’s choice of plans is very similar to other director when they introduce their main character. This indicates that classical Hollywood decoupage could be a cinematic representation of Aristotle’s deductive reasoning. The purpose of this article is to analyze the beginning sequence of these five films to demonstrate law of Ws and to prove this law’s conformity with Aristotle’s theories.