This week’s class was dedicated to the concepts of story and plot, or ‘Fabula’ and ‘Syuzhet’. Although these two concepts overlap, there is a critical difference between them both. Story can be described as all the information within a film that is explicit and inferred by both parties involved (Characters and audience). However, Plot can be defined as all information that is everything explicitly illustrated to the audience and not the characters, such as non-diagetic sound.

This discussion furthered into an exercise on noticing and inferring information from the film Casablanca (1942). Having not watched the film (I thought we were supposed to be watching Gentlement Prefer Blondes) this proved to be an interesting and useful exercise for me. We analysed one of the final scenes from the film and we were able to analyse the scene using our recognition of mise-en-scene. We took into account the positioning of the characters, the layout of the set, the positioning of props and the non-diagetic sounds from within the scene.

We also spoke briefly about cinematic styles and effects used by directors to induce certain feelings and moods and promote specific ideas. A perfect example of such a technique is the ‘flashback’ or ‘montage’ effect. These techniques, used by directors to suggest a journey back through the story, induce sentiments of nostalgia upon the audience – and more often than not reveal important details about the story or plot that may have otherwise not been shown.