Abstract
Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies—narrational structure and how it impacts us—to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts—setup, complication, development, and climax—with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain—plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories—but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.
Highlights
Popular movies grab and hold our attention
Following narrative theory, I wished to fit seven points that might be spread over the space defined by shot duration and by the runtime—the two endpoints, the very beginning and the very end of the movies or Bins 1 and 100; and as many as five points suggested by Robert Towne
It is again fit with a sixth-order polynomial, adjusted R2 = .87, F(6, 13) = 22.05, p < .0001, it is again superior to all lower order fits, and in 10,000 two-fold cross-validation tests the sixth order fits to the training and test data suggest that this polynomial is a reasonable expression of the underlying pattern of the syuzhet
Summary
Popular movies grab and hold our attention One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. Understanding narrative structure has occupied many disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In this vein, psychologists have studied story grammars (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975) and related concepts like discourse (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978), scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977), and schemata (Brewer, 1985).
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