How to Understand Film Narrative?

1.� How do the channels of information in film--visual image, print and other graphics, speech, music, sound effects--work together to communicate the narrative? Which channel is dominant?

2. How is the story told? (linear, with flashbacks, flash forwards, episodically?)

3. Is there a recognizable source of the narration? Voice-over or off-screen commentary? What is the narrator's perspective?

4. Does the film acknowledge the spectator or do events transpire as if no one were present? Do characters look into the camera or pretend it is not there, for instance?

5. Does the film reflect on its "constructedness" by breaking the illusion of a self-sufficient "story apparently told by nobody"? Are there intertitles, film-within-film sequences, obtrusive and self-conscious ("un-realistic") camera movements calling attention to the fact that the film is a construct?

6. How does the film position the viewer vis-a-vis the on-screen events? Are we made to favor certain characters, to respond in certain ways to certain events (say, through music that "tells" us how to respond or distances us from the action)? Does the film appeal to certain expectations, i.e., generic conventions? (We expect a man dressed in black shrouded in a shadow to be sinister, for instance.) Does the film subvert these conventions or conform to them? What kind of conventions are they? Does the film play with certain genre expectations (comedy, melodrama, western, science fiction, documentary, etc.)?