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Chapter 2: Narrative

Essay: Story, Plot, and Time in Film

One of the most fundamental decisions that filmmakers make about how to relay story information through the plot is to establish the order of plot events. Unlike story order, which necessarily flows chronologically (as does life), plot order can be manipulated so that events are presented in nonchronological sequences that emphasize importance or meaning or that establish desired expectations in audiences.
Richard Barsam, Looking at Movies

One of the more risky things a filmmaker can do is to rearrange the order of plot events. The filmmaker who radically rearranges events risks bewildering viewers, who may fail to construct a "story" from the fractured plot they are presented with, or who may find the whole viewing experience less than compelling. When the risk pays off, as it does in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000), audiences appreciate and ultimately comprehend a story derived from what we might call a scrambled plot. Fiction films with scrambled plots tend to work with atypical structures in the same way that experimental films do: the nonlinear structure offers a logic all its own. The ordering patterns of Citizen Kane and Rashomon are based on the repetition of, respectively, a life story and one event, reported through multiple narrators. Thus both films offer alternative and elaborative treatments of their plot elements. Mysteries—about crimes, about the meaning of a tycoon's cryptic last words—lie at the hearts of all four of these movies, whose manipulations of plot order both deepen the questions raised by plot events and raise questions of their own about those events. In this way, drawing together the storytelling process and the story-receiving process, the filmmakers have united the movies' form and content.

In Memento, plot scrambling engages the audience in a crime story and suggests the experience of the main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who cannot form long-term memories. Like a person who can't recall anything that happened more than a few moments ago, the audience must struggle to make sense of time, events, and causality. (For a more detailed look at, among other things, the relationship between Leonard Shelby's condition and the narrative form of Memento, see "Modern Indemnity," the sample student paper at the end of chapter 8.)


Black-and-white sequence running chronologically	A wall chart used in place of memory

Tatoos used in place of memory	Photographs used in place of memory

Although the pattern might not be apparent to the first-time viewer, Memento in fact presents two intertwined narrative threads that ultimately connect: a black-and-white sequence that runs chronologically and color segments that play in reverse plot chronology (each new scene reveals a previous event in the story). To help the viewer make sense of this reverse chronology, story elements are repeated; each scene ends with a part of the story that was depicted in a previous scene, as illustrated in this diagram:

Plot Frequency

The frequency, or number of times, with which a story element recurs in a plot is an important aspect of narrative form. If an event occurs once in a plot, we accept it as a functioning part of the narrative's progression. However, repeating it more than once suggests a pattern and thus a different level of importance. . . . Similarly, in Rashomon (1950; screenwriter: Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto), Akira Kurosawa poses the question "how can we ever know the truth?" by having four different characters recount the story of the same crime. Three were participants in the crime; the fourth witnessed it.
Looking at Movies

Retelling one event in different ways allows filmmakers to enrich a story by adding another layer of significance each time. Just as memory allows us to revisit important events over and over again to better understand them, the repetition of plot elements creates a dramatic and thematic gravity that might be difficult to achieve with one telling.

Most film viewers are familiar with the plot formula in which a story begins with its own end and uses flashbacks to trace its way back to the end. The flashback structure is widely used in film noirs, murder mysteries, and other narratives that involve an investigative component. This formula provides the narrative with a goal or point of return, raises a viewer's curiosity, and ultimately gives the film a "bookend" structure that unifies the story. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), for example, begins and ends with Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi's assassination. As an opening event, Gandhi's death embues the rest of his life story with sadness, gravity, and fatalism. James Cameron's Titanic (1997) begins and ends in the present, tracing Brock Lovett 's (Bill Paxton) search for a lost diamond in the ship's wreckage, an expedition that prompts Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet) to recall her doomed shipboard romance with Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Plot Duration

Events, in life and in the movies, take time to occur. Duration is this length of time. When talking about narrative movies specifically, we can identify three specific kinds of duration: story duration is the amount of time that the implied story takes to occur; plot duration is the elapsed time of those events within the story that the film explicitly presents (in other words, the elapsed time of the plot); and screen duration is the movie's running time onscreen.
Looking at Movies

Narrative movies typically omit the slow parts of daily life. Instead, they compress their stories, presenting plots that encourage viewers to infer events and time periods deemed unworthy of dramatization. Thus a film may take only a couple of hours to depict a person's entire life. Early movies such as the Lumière brothers' actualités and experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964) bring together cinematic time and real time so that the depictions last just as long as the events, but imagine the difficulty, for filmmakers and audiences, of using this approach to recount an entire life.

One of the most famous real-time dramatic films is Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), a feature-length thriller without a single apparent editing cut or transition. In Rope, a murder mystery occurs, from crime to arrest, in eighty minutes: the film's running time. Hitchcock hides the necessary cuts between segments, which run from about five minutes to about ten minutes—ten minutes being the longest roll of film that the cameras could hold—by ending and beginning scenes with the camera focused on the same solid color or object. The director and his critics have long considered this noble experiment one of Hitchcock's weakest films. Cinematically limited because of the single setting, the lack of editing, and the heavy camera equipment used at the time (decades before the advent of the highly mobile Steadicam), Rope challenges our conventional notions of time and space in the feature film, but it also resembles a filmed theatrical performance.


The strangulation of a friend	Guess where the corpse is stowed

The struggle for the gun	Killers caught; waiting for the police

Any fictional film that employs real time faces the problem of dealing with the slow moments of real life. How can filmmakers shoot an entire film or even extended sections of a film in real time and still present engaging, entertaining, and artistic content? How can cast and crew deliver their best performances in long takes and without the aid of multiple takes? One solution has been to pick events and moments that are naturally dramatic in real time. John Badham's Nick of Time (1995; 90 mins.), for example, is about an assassination, while both Josh Becker's Running Time (1997; 70 mins.) and Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998; 80 mins.) focus on the events surrounding a robbery.

A more recent experiment in real-time filming is Time Code (2000), developed by independent director Mike Figgis, whose Leaving Las Vegas (1995) was one of the most successful independent films of the 1990s. Like Robert Altman's The Player (1992), Time Code is largely a study of the pawing and scratching for love and career of people in the movie industry. Offering no hypercharged event at the start of its real-time story, the movie presents four long takes simultaneously in split screen, all of which depict the comings and goings of members of a fictional film company. All four ninety-three-minute takes were filmed using handheld digital cameras, beginning at the same time, 3 p.m., on November 19, 1999. Figgis set up certain basic plot points, but the actors largely improvised their roles.


Limousine; shrink; casting call; front desk of a film studio	An earthquake from four perspectives

A play on faces in four panels

For the makers of Time Code, the solution to offering dramatic, interesting, and artistic cinema in real time was to hope that something happening before at least one of the four cameras, or the cumulative effect of four minidramas playing at once, would be worth watching. The experiment was only somewhat successful. Chance sometimes brings together similar images, as when four close-ups result in an interesting visual composition. The drama is occasionally heightened when characters in all four panels respond differently to the same event, such as one of the four earthquakes that strike. Meanwhile, the film's four simultaneous sound tracks help draw audience attention to particular panels, as the volume goes up for one and goes down for the other three. While Time Code appears to have no imitators and to have had no impact on the way other filmmakers treat film time, Figgis continued the experiment with his next film, the real-time-in-split-screen Hotel (2001).


Everyone on the phone, on the make	Three panels intersect: lovers behind the stage, a jealous lover listens in

Three panels intersect: the murder

Split Screen

One of the largest gatherings of humans ever, the Woodstock festival of 1969 was ideally suited for Michael Wadleigh's widescreen and split-screen filming. In Wadleigh's nonfiction film Woodstock (1970), the inclusive spirit of the event and the time period it came to symbolize seem to be echoed in the multiplicity of perspectives offered by the split screen and the superimposition of images on it. In fact, we might say that this visually stunning film transcends the event it records. The simultaneity of split screen affects the viewer's perception of time and space, suggesting in one scene a sense of godlike omniscience and in another a sense of dynamic change and variety. The split screen also allows Wadleigh to explore thematic and compositional dynamics. Throughout Woodstock, the action on one panel on the split screen often implicitly comments on or embellishes what is happening on another.