Abstract
Popular movies have an event structure that includes scenes and sequences. Scenes are fashioned to be perceived as smoothly flowing, a feature called continuity. Discontinuity is said to occur when scene (event) boundaries are crossed. This article focuses on the structure and perception of sequences that have subscenes (i.e., scene-like components) but whose boundaries, unlike those of scenes, tend to demonstrate some perceived continuity. Although the structure of sequences has been addressed by film theory, this topic has not received psychological attention. Here, data are used from viewer judgments and physical measurements of 24 popular movies, released from 1940 to 2010. Each film was inspected for narrative shift patterns—that is, changes in location, character, or time—across shots. Sequences were determined by repeated shift types, common sound coverage, and the shorter durations of subscenes than of scenes. By these criteria, sequences have increased in movies over time. The results also show that viewer judgments of event boundaries diminish in the presence of music and of shorter and less modulated shot durations. These results fit snugly within event segmentation theory, and this categorization of movie sequences by narrative shifts can accommodate previous accounts of sequence structure.
Highlights
Popular movies have an event structure that includes scenes and sequences
Many agree that Bin a well-edited movie, cuts that classical film theory would identify as scene breaks should be identified as event boundaries^ (Zacks & Magliano, 2011, p. 442; see Cutting, 2014; Tan, 2018; Zacks, 2015)
The distribution of narrative shifts in these sequences is given in Table 1, along with the distribution of shifts among the scenes outside of sequences
Summary
Popular movies have an event structure that includes scenes and sequences. Scenes are fashioned to be perceived as smoothly flowing, a feature called continuity. The results show that viewer judgments of event boundaries diminish in the presence of music and of shorter and less modulated shot durations These results fit snugly within event segmentation theory, and this categorization of movie sequences by narrative shifts can accommodate previous accounts of sequence structure. What follows an end is less predictable than what follows a middle (Zacks & Swallow, 2007), and a new beginning initiates the formation of a new schema for understanding—an event model (Zacks, Speer, Swallow, Braver, & Reynolds, 2007), analogous to a situation model in prose understanding (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) In both purpose-made research videos and edited professional films, event boundaries can affect memory, in that boundaries that intercede between an item to be remembered and its test can impede its recall (Swallow, Zacks, & Abrams, 2009). Together, such models serve as integrated and interconnected memory schemata, analogous to Gernsbacher’s (1995) structure-building framework for language comprehension
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