Introduction to Film Studies
Film Form and Film Style
Openings and Endings
• The narrative starts from its very beginning – ab
obo or ab initio
• Casablanca begins with an introduction in which
the film’s backgrounds are explained away.
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Stranger on a Train (1951)
Tennis star Guy Haines meets Bruno Anthony, a
stranger on a train. Knowing from a gossip
magazine that Guy wants to divorce from his
wife, Bruno proposes the perfect ‘criss-cross’
murders.
Opening and Endings
• Medias-res - an artistic and literary technique
of relating a story from a midpoint rather than
the beginning.
• Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) - about
the rise and fall of a Lucchese Family associate
Henry Hill and his friends over the period of
1955 to 1980
Openings and Endings
• Closed ending - narrative ends with an unequivocal
conclusion Casablanca
• Open ending - narrative ends without clear
conclusion and solution so that the reader and the
viewer wonder what will happen after the end of
the stories.
• François Truffaut’s 400 Blows (Quatre cent coups,
1959)
• A teenage boy misunderstood at home and school,
commits a minor crime and is sent to an
observation centre for the juvenile delinquent. He
escapes from it while playing football.
Narrative Analysis
• Five foci in the narrative analysis of Gérard
Genette’s Narratology. Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method (1980)
• Order, frequency, duration, voice and mood
• Order: an order of event units being told
• Chronological order: telling events following one
after another in time; from the oldest to the most
recent event
• (a) crime conceived (b) crime planned (c)crime
committed (d) crime discovered (e) detective
investigates (f) detective reveals
Narrative Analysis
• Narration out of chronological order
• Order of telling events is manipulated according
to the logic other than chronological
• Events sequence (a)(b)(c)(d)(e)(f) can be very
typically into (d) crime discovered (e) detective
investigates (f) detective reveals and then (a)
crime conceived (b) crime planned (c)crime
committed; or (d)(e), and simultaneously with (e)
(a)(b)(c) and finally (f)
• Telling older events later, (a)(b)(c) told after
(d)(e)(f) is called ‘flashback’
Order
Distant Lives
• Most of the stories in Citizen Kane are flashbacks.
• In Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives,
we see scenes set in the present during a young
woman’s wedding day. These alternate with
flashbacks to a time when her family lived under
the sway of an abusive, mentally disturbed father.
Order
• Flashforward – a scene that takes the narrative
forward in time from the current time of the plot
• Nichola Roeg’s Don’t Look Now
• A man sees his wife in black on a boat, though she
is supposed to be away. At the end of the film, it is
revealed that she is with her husband’s coffin.
Frequency
• An event can occur once and be narrated once
(singular) Today I went to the bar.
• An event can occur n times and be narrated once
(iterative) I used to go to the bar.
• An event can occur once and be narrated n times
(repetitive) I went to the bar. Other people saw
me going to the bar.
• An event can occur n times and be narrated n
times (multiple) I used to go to the bar and other
people saw me going to the bar a number of times.
Frequency
• Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998) – a young
woman gets fired from her public relations job.
After she waits for her train on the London
Underground, the plot splits into two: one in which
she catches the train, the other detailing the
separate path she would have taken if she missed it.
Duration
• Difference between discourse time and
narrative time
• Discourse time – time spent to narrate the event
Narrative time – real time that has passed for an
event to take place
• ‘5 years later’ a lengthy narrative time, but it
could be a matter of second in discourse time
Duration
• Narrative time is normally shorter than discourse
time
• Several million years are covered in Space
Odyssey by 161 minutes
• Kane’s life covered in Citizen Kane in 119 mins.
• Many years covered in Amadeus by 138 minutes
• Four days covered in North by Northwest by 136
minutes
• One day covered in Hiroshima, mon amour by 90
minutes
Duration
• Elipsis: the omission of a large section of a
narrative
• Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story - the scene of mother
lying in coma cut to the morning scene, in which
she is already passed away.
Duration
• In some films discourse time, plot time last as
long as narrative time or real time.
• Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964)
• Cezare Zavattini’s experimental omnibus film,
Love in the City (1953) Tre ore di paradiso
Duration
• Also rarely discourse
time is longer than
narrative time
• Kon Ichikawa’s
Tokyo Olympiad
• 10 second 100 meter
race is lengthen to 30
seconds
• Tokyo Olympiade
Voice
• Voice is connected with who narrates and from
where
• Where the narration is from:
 Intra-diagetic: inside the text
(narrated from
the film narrative)
 Extra-diagetic: outside the text (narrated from
outside film narrative)
Voice
• Who narrates:
 Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character
in a film
 Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in a
film
• First person narrating and third person narrating
Voice
• Intra-diegetic, homo-diegetic first person narrating
• David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) – a
housewife who is having an affair with a married
doctor whom she met in a station is narrating what
is going on inside herself. Rachmaninov’s music
as a extra-diegetic element.
Voice
• Extra-diegetic, hetero-diegetic third person
narrating: the speaker speaks from outside the story
never using ‘I’
• Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema Fishermen’s
plight and exploitation is narrated by Visconti.
Mood
• Mood – the various degree of ‘distance’ created
between the narrator of a film and what she
narrates.
• Distance helps the viewer to determine the degree
of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of
information conveyed.
• Unreliable narrator: the distance between a
narrator and what he narrates is wide:
• The narrator in Citizen Kane – a journalist
gathering information about who Kane really is
and what ‘rose bud’ really means.
Mood
Lady in the Lake
• First-person perspective – the camera become the
viewpoint of the film as well as a character
• Robert Montgomery’s ambition to create a
cinematic version of the first-person narrative of
Raymond Chandler in Lady in the Lake (1947)