Film100

• It is because storytelling is so common and so powerful, we need to take a close look at how films both fictional and non fictional embody this form.

  Narrative Form
• a chain of events linked by cause and effects and occurring in time and space.

  Narrative
• It is what we usually mean by the term story

  Narrative
• We make sense of a narrative, then, by identifying its events and linking them by cause

  and effect.

  We also look out for parallels that shed light on the ongoing action.

  Narrative
• Allows the film to be more complex than what might have been concentrated on only the protagonist.

  Parallelism
• a captivating storytelling technique where a film or television show juggles two (or more) distinct narratives

  Parallelism
• The story is a chain of events leading to a chronological order.

  Different plots are created depending on the choices we make as a storyteller

  Filmakers build the plot for the story but viewers build the story from the plot.

  Plot-distinction affects all three aspects of narrative: casualty, time and space.
• by triggering events and reacting to them, characters play casual roles within the film’s narrative form.

  Cause and Effect
• In any narrative, either fictional or not, characters create cause and register effects.

  They make things happen and respond to events.

  Characters are complex, three dimensional.

  Characters as Causes
• As viewers we try to connect events by means of cause and effect.

  Given an incident, we tend to imagine what might have caused it or what it might in turn

  cause it.

  hiding Causes, hiding Effects
• involves the planting of information in advance of a scene.

  When a film presents causes but withholds effects. Which creates curiosity and suspense.

  Casual Motivation
• Can encourage us to ponder possible outcomes.

  Open-Ended plot
• cause and effects are basic to narrative, but they take place in time.

  Time
• Three types of time

  Temporal Duration

  Temporal Order

  Temporal Frequency
• How are events sequenced?

  Filmmakerscan can choose to present events out of story order.

  Flashbacks- usually don’t confuse us because we mentally re-arrange the events into

  chronological order.

  Flash forward can also be used.

  Temporal Order
• How long does the event take?

  Film’s plot selects only certain stretches of story duration.

  Screen duration selects from overall plot duration.

  Screen duration can expand story duration.

  Temporal Duration
• How do we often see or hear the event?

  Mostly a story event is presented only once in the plot, however, a single story event may appear twice or even more in the plot treatment.

  This increased frequency may allow us to see the same action in several ways.

  Repetition can take place simply within the soundtrack.

  Lines of dialogues repeat to create a haunting trauma for a character.

  Temporal Frequency
• is usually an important factor.

  Normally, the locale of the story action is also that of the plot, but sometimes the plot leads us to imagine story spaces that are never shown.

  Space
• a film does not just start, it begins.

  The opening provides a basis for what is to come and initiates us into the narrative.

  It raises our expectations by setting up a specific range of possible causes for what we see.

  The first quarter or so in a film's plot is referred to as setup.

  Openings
• Action has already started, in the middle of things

  Medias res
• Portion of the plot that lays out the backstory and initial situation

  Exposition
• change is essential in a narrative, and a common pattern traces a change in knowledge.

  Goal-oriented plot- a character takes steps to achieve an object or condition.


  Development Sections
• A film does not simply stop, it ends.

  The plot will typically resolve its casual issues by bringing up development to a high point, or climax.

  Climaxes and Closings
• the flow of story information

  In looking at how a filmmaker tells a story, we’ve emphasized matters of plot structures: how parts, from beginning to end, are fitted together to shape the viewer's experience.

  The plot's way of distributing story information in order to achieve specific effects.

  Range and depth of a story

  Narration
• Restricted or Unrestricted

  Range of story information
• extremely knowledgable narrations (All knowing)

  Omni-scient Narration
• a matter of degree

  Unrestricted and restricted narration aren't watertight categories but rather but two ends of a continuum

  Range of Knowledge
• The audience knows more information than the protagonist

  Unrestricted Narration
• the audience doesn’t know, see or hear any more from the narrator than the characters within the film we already know.

  Restricted Narration
• who knows what when

  Range of Narration
• objective or subjective

  hearing sounds as the character would hear them, what sound recordists call sound perspective.

  The filmmaker can go deeper, beyond the character's senses and into her or his mind. We can call this mental subjectivity.

  depth of story information
• hearing sounds as the character would hear them, what sound recordists call

  Sound perspective
• The filmmaker can go deeper, beyond the character's senses and into her or his mind. We can call this

  Mental subjectivity
• Some specific agent who purports to be telling us the story.

  The narrator may be a character in the story.

  The Narrator
• one of the most original films to come out of Hollywood. It has won praise

  on many counts.

  Citizen Kane
• it relies on genre conventions

  Draws on Hollywood narrative conventions

  Overall Narrative Expectation
• Kane’s life through

  flashbacks
• 65 years of his life

  120 minutes

  Duration and Frequency