Abstract
Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movies. In particular, arrangements of shot durations, motion, and luminance have altered and come to reflect aspects of the narrative form. Narrative form, on the other hand, appears to have been relatively unchanged over that time and is often characterized as having four more or less equal duration parts, sometimes called acts – setup, complication, development, and climax. The altered patterns in film style found here affect a movie’s pace: increasing shot durations and decreasing motion in the setup, darkening across the complication and development followed by brightening across the climax, decreasing shot durations and increasing motion during the first part of the climax followed by increasing shot durations and decreasing motion at the end of the climax. Decreasing shot durations mean more cuts; more cuts mean potentially more saccades that drive attention; more motion also captures attention; and brighter and darker images are associated with positive and negative emotions. Coupled with narrative form, all of these may serve to increase the engagement of the movie viewer.
Highlights
Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years
If this is the outcome of esthetic analysis on the one side, of psychological research on the other, we need only combine the results of both into a unified principle: the [movie] tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion
Conjectures on how pace has converged on narrative form As a recap, let me proceed through the sequential narrative structure of movies and outline the changes in film style, when they occurred
Summary
[E]very shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectator’s mind can mold the scenes in [a movie] until they appear the embodiment of our feelings. Elsewhere, Cutting, DeLong, Brunick, Iricinschi, and Candan (2011) as well as Cutting (2014b) looked at changes in movies across release years and found striking changes – shorter shot durations, more motion, and darker imagery over the last 60 years These whole-film measures are coarse and fail to take into account narrative structure. I explored the variations in a dozen aspects of film style as they are distributed along the length of movies These included shot duration; shot transition types (cuts, dissolves, fades, and the like); shot scale; motion; music; luminance; character introduction; conversations; action shots; and across-shot changes in location, characters, and time.
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