How does cinematic fiction render the ordinary world intelligible?

Narrative is one of the fundamental ways in which we organnize the world. In recent years the study of narrative has acquired a new and prominent role in theorizing film theory.

How do you study narratology?

• You should study theories about the nature of those patterns and structures, which are created while consciuonsly reading a text;
• You should look at the concept of causality, space and time and how they have been perceived as data in an imagined story world;
• You should ask yourself how to represent a particular event within a narrative schema;
• You should also expand the concept of the spectator’s knowledge beyond immediate seeing to include other influences: cultural expectations, memory of previous scenes and the sound track;
• You should create a hierarchy of roles or levels which describes the typical ways in which a reader participates in a novel.

It isn’t a simple task, but Edward Branigan has done it in his Narrative Comprehension and Film. His principal references are Todorov’s causal-transformation theory of narrative and Stephen Heath’s theory of displacement.

Edward Branigan offers us a great deal of substance and a range of attractive speculative insights. The book explain us how to relate the double argument about narrative in film and human perception as interpretive construals.

Category: Uncategorized