Tag Archives: plot

Cinema Studies

Narrative and Mystery Road

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Narrative form is a framework in which a series of events is arranged in time and space, governed by the effects of causality. Narrative films may or may not be presented in chronological story order, the plot duration may or may not match the story duration (usually not), and the space may be real or imagined, but just by operating in such a way that causes and effects occur in some kind of temporal order, in some kind of defined space, means that a film has a narrative.

The plot of Mystery Road is a tiny keyhole through which a sprawling story is viewed. The story stretches back years in the past, across many locations involving hundreds of characters, but the plot is restricted to Jay’s experience investigating a single crime in a relatively small number of locations. So while the story duration is several years, the plot duration is mere days, and the screen duration is just over two hours.

The story information is meted out as Jay discovers it (the narration is subjective), involving the audience in the processes and procedures of detective work as he uncovers the real causes and motivations that lie behind the crime. The story space is quite vast, involving cities, towns and other locations across Australia, but the plot space is restricted only to the locations Jay visits in investigating the crime. Interestingly, the screen space could actually be considered larger than the plot space, because there are a number of gorgeous extreme long shots of vast outback locations that stretch far further than the spaces in which characters interact.

Causality in Mystery Road, as is often the case in thrillers and crime films, is meticulously controlled. Causes turn into effects, which spark more causes, and the plot continues along a narrow thread of story information. The climax of the film resolves the major chains of cause and effect, but there are also significant events that happen off screen, or are presumed to have occurred before or after the plot sequence (most notably the inciting murder).

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Media 1, Readings

Three-act structure

Michael Rabiger (2009)1, a professor and academic specialising in documentary studies, gives a helpful and succinct summary of the three-act narrative structure:

  • ACT I: establishes the setup (characters, relationships, situations and the dominant problem faced by the central character/s
  • ACT II: escalates the complications in relationships as the central character struggles with obstacles
  • ACT III: intensifies the situation to a point of climax or confrontation, which the central character then resolves, often in a climactic way that is emotionally satisfying

The name given to this collection of changes and developments is the dramatic or story arc, and each individual moment of change is called a beat.

I still struggle with the idea that rigid structures like three-act narrative are necessarily good. My natural inclination is to suspect that such formulaic progressions are used not just as vague guides but as templates that actually hinder the development of interesting or new stories. Indeed, some of my filmmaker friends seem entirely wedded to the idea that particular story beats must occur at certain points in their script.

But basically all of the films it’s possible to see in mainstream cinemas today, even those I would consider “unconventional”, are still governed by three-act structure even if the structure is not immediately identifiable. The only films that truly eschew traditional structures like these are the genuinely experimental films of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker and Maya Deren.

  1. Michael Rabiger, 2009, Directing the Documentary, 5th Edition (Focus Press) pp.283-291 ↩
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