Summary—“Narrative I”

·In contrast to the assumption made by most critical writing on Hollywood that the primary purpose of a movie is to tell a story, this book argues that in Hollywood, narrative functions as part of the provision of pleasure in cinema entertainment, not as the point of it. The story is the part of the movie that holds its component parts together, sequences them, and provides an explanation or justification for that sequencing.

·Movies seldom tell their audiences a story; instead they show the actions and events from which viewers can construct the story. The conventions of cinematic narration are very different from those employed in verbal forms of story - telling.

·Cinematic narration can change its viewpoint at will, to cut freely between different camera positions within a scene and between scenes in different locations. It has, however, no spatial equivalent to the temporal distance of a literary narrator from the events he or she narrates. The closest a movie comes to that omniscience is in its musical accompaniment, the element in a movie most conspicuously located outside the diegetic world.

·The plot is the order in which events are represented in the movie, for which the Formalists used the word "syuzhet." The story, on the other hand, is the reconstruction of the events in their chronological order, through which we can establish the chain of causality which links them, which the Formalists called the "fabula." Narration is the process by which a plot is arranged to permit the telling of a story.

·Because cinematic fictions unfold in the continuous present, they are often taken to be self-narrated. This is perhaps the most potent source of cinema's so-called "reality effect": the idea that a Hollywood movie promotes the illusion that its viewers are watching an unmediated reality.

·The typical Hollywood movie seeks to appear as a transparent, coherent, unified; story-telling whole, linking plot events in a sequence of cause and effect. Devices such as "invisible" editing draw no attention to their contribution to the movie's narration. Nevertheless, movies invariably contain coincidences, inconsistencies, gaps, and delays, which are signs of the competing logics which also inform Hollywood's commercial aesthetic.

·Formalism's contention that other pleasures are ultimately subordinate to those presented by the story takes no account of the agency of the viewer, who may privilege other aspects of the movie going experience, such as watching the performance of a particular star. Movies themselves also subordinate narrative and character consistency to other objectives, such as displaying stars, or instances of autonomous spectacle.

·In making sense out of the assembly of devices active in any given scene or sequence of scenes, the audience seeks a sense of motivation, a logical justification for its inclusion in the narrative. Usually the four kinds of motivation identified by Formalist criticism - compositional, realistic, intertextual, and artistic - operate collaboratively.