film author argument paper

FTV4 SECTION HANDOUT: FILM NARRATIVE—KEY TERMS Basic concepts

• Narrative: a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space

• Story: the set of all the events in a narrative, both the ones explicitly presented and those the viewer infers

• Plot: everything visibly and audibly present in the film before us STORY

Presumed and inferred events Explicitly presented events Added nondiegetic material (e.g. film score)

PLOT Elements of narrative

• Cause and effect: Most commonly, characters trigger events; often their character traits explain why or how (e.g. Indiana Jones is bold and resourceful)

• Sometimes a natural event (e.g. an earthquake) is a cause • Many films add suspense by withholding info about a cause or an effect

• Time: as they construct story out of plot, viewers put events in chronological order and assign them some duration and frequency

• Space: where action occurs, usually as part of the plot but sometimes as a part of story, where a space is inferred/imagined

Openings, closing, development

• You can usually learn a lot about a film by comparing its beginning to its ending • How do plots usually develop?

• Protagonist has a desire resulting in a goal*-- goals may change • Another character has opposing traits and goals* • May be an investigation, search, or desire to explain current state of affairs • Closure—we learn answers and fates of characters*

*Indicates an element of the “Classical Hollywood Cinema” common in many films but NOT universal

Narration: the flow of story information

• Range of story information • Unrestricted narration: omniscient; viewers know more than any of the

characters • Restricted narration: we only know what a character knows • A mixture of both is common

• Depth of story information • Objective narration: we see only characters’ external behavior, what they

say and do • Subjective narration: we see what characters see, or hear what they hear;

may involve a “point-of-view shot” or “sound perspective” • Narrators, when present, are a specific agent telling us the story; they may be

unrestricted or restricted, objective or subjective