IM – 3 | 1
CHAPTER 3
NARRATIVE FORM
Chapter Outline
Principles of Narrative Form
What is Narrative?
Telling the Story
Plot and Story
Cause and Effect
Time
Space
Openings, Closings, and Patterns of Development
A Closer Look: Playing Games with Story Time
Narration: The Flow of Story Information
Range of Story Information: Restricted or Unrestricted?
Depth of Story Information: Objective or Subjective?
The Narrator
A Closer Look: When the Lights Go Down, the Narration Starts
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
Narrative Form in Citizen Kane
Overall Narrative Expectations in Citizen Kane
Plot and Story in Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane’s Causality
Time in Citizen Kane
Motivation in Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane’s Parallelism
Patterns of Plot Development in Citizen Kane
Narration in Citizen Kane
Summary
Teaching “Narrative Form”
The Purpose of the Chapter
CHAPTER 3 NARRATIVE FORM
IM – 3 | 2
consists of and how it affects us. This chapter aims to get students to step back and
examine aspects of storytelling that they usually take for granted. They should come to
realize that viewing a narrative film is not simply a passive activity, and that they as
viewers are actively engaged in forming expectations about what will happen and in
keeping track of how events relate to one another.
One basic tool for the students’ examination of narrative form is the distinction between
plot (the events as they are presented on the screen) and story (the events as we
mentally reconstruct them in chronological order). Understanding the plot-story
distinction will help the students understand a film’s narrative as constructed by the
filmmakers. Moreover, the construction of the story (for example, figuring out how
events depicted in flashbacks fit into the story’s chronology) is one of the activities that
make us participate in the ongoing development of the film.
Lecturing On and Discussing Narrative Form
The main example of a narrative film used in Chapter 3 is Citizen Kane. This is the most
important example used in the entire textbook, and it is dealt with extensively here and
again in Chapter 8, “Summary: Style and Film Form.” Teachers use Citizen Kane in
their introductory courses more frequently than any other film. It offers an ideal example
of narrative form, since its complex flashback structure shows the students quite clearly
how the order of events as presented in the film’s plot can differ greatly from the way we
as spectators sort out those events while we reconstruct the story mentally.
CHAPTER 3 NARRATIVE FORM
IM – 3 | 3
understand it. You might also consider showing a short film with a simple scrambling of
temporal order (for instance, Robert Clampett’s The Old Grey Hare, which flashes
forward to Bugs Bunny’s and Elmers Fudd’s old age, then back to their childhood, and
then back to their old age again) and make an outline of it. If you show Citizen Kane,
you might go over the subsection on “Time” in the section “Narrative Form in Citizen
Kane” and expand on our little outline of boyhood to old age by asking the students to
recall other events associated with those sections and when we learn about them.
For a longer and more complex paper, you could assign your students to write a
narrative analysis of a film, applying one or all of the main concepts discussed in
Chapter 3, depending on the length of the paper.