Notes on reading Bordwell and Thompson
- Causality, Time and Space as central to the understanding of a narrative.
- Parallelism: a similarity among different elements (eg. Dorothy’s 3 Kansas farm hands are parallel to her 3 companions in Oz
- Invites us to compare and contrast the various elements at play.
- Plot and Story: We often infer events that are not explicitly presented. We make assumptions based on cues.
- Story: presumed and inferred events; diegesis Ithe totally world of the action)
- Plot: The explicitly presented, nondiegetic material
- Cause and Effect: spectators seek to connect events by means of cause and effect: we look for causal motivation.
- Time: spectators construct story time on the basis of what the plot presents
- We are active audiences in navigating through a films manipulation of order,duration and frequency and constructing chronology.
- Space: The physical space of actors as well as the visible space on the screen (screen space)
- Patterns of development (plot progression): change in character knowledge, goal-oriented plot,
- Experimental film: wilfully nonconformist
- Abstract, Associational forms
- DOCUMENTARY film:
- Categorical: aims to convey information in a simple fashion
- Rhetorical: Filmmaker wished to make an argument or convince the spectator.