What Bordwell is attempting to do is develop a means for defining narration for all mediums that involve story telling.  Unified theory of film criticism can be used for any art form.

• Borrowing from Freud's preconscious theory, which is "the realm of elements "capable of entering consciousness", Bordwell states "The spectator simply has no concepts or terms for the textual elements and systems that shape responses.  It is the job of theory to construct them, the job of analysis to show them at work.  A full theory of narration must be able to specify the objective devises and forms that elicit the spectator's activity" (30)

• Uses cognitive psychology - understand how the mind works.

• Cognitive theory of art is built on the idea that we understand art by cues that the text provides.

• Clear sense of cause and effect.

• The plot represents the text point by point.

• Style: A film's systematic use of cinematic devices, such as black and white, costuming, scenes, etc.

• Story and plot pertain to any medium.

• Plot can make educated guesses.  

• Causality is important.  time is important.

• Film style - used to set up story.

• Most films still conform to classic model.

• Film artists should strive to make something like Christopher Nolan's Momento.

• Plot or (syuzhet) gives us - governed by genre codes:

  • quantity

  • relevance - is it pertinent?

  • relationship between plot and story

• Rarefied plot - not enough information to construct a story.  Example: "Blow Up" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

• Overloaded plot - too much information.

• Most important variable - produce gaps.  Narrative is the art of illusion - gaps.  

• Gaps:

  • spacial

  • temporal

  • causal

• Realist narrative - contain only information relevant to characters in story.

• Hollywood/classic films had seamless continuity.  Gaps were suppressed.  Exposition in popular literature and Hollywood films is put in beginning or end.

• Modernist films flaunt the gaps

• Exposition tends to slow things down.

• Concentrated exposition puts lots in one place and then can refer back.

• Voice over or/and text???

• Russian formalism has roots from Aristotle.

• Fabula for story.  The fabula is thus a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences.  "The viewer builds the fabula on the basis of prototype schemata (identifiable types of persons, actions, locales, etc.), template schemata (principally the "canonic" story), and procedural schemata (a search for appropriate motivations and relations of causality, time, and space)."  "A film's fabula is never materially present on the screen or soundtrack" (31).  "In cinema, the narration can arrange fabula information temporally or spatially..." (37).

• Syuzhet "(usually translated as "plot") is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film."  "It is a more abstract construct." (32)  "The syuzhet ... is the dramaturgy of the fiction film, the organized set of cues prompting us to infer and assemble story information" (34).  "In any narrative text in any medium, the syuzhet controls the amount and the degree of pertinence of the information we receive.  They syuzhet creates various sorts of gaps in our construction of the fabula; it also combines information according to principles of retardation and redundancy.  All of these procedures function to cue and guide the spectator's narrative activity" (39).

• Style mixes with the syuzhet and simply names the film's systematic use of cinematic devises.  Style is thus wholly ingredient to the medium.  "Note that in a narrative film these two systems coexist.  "...syuzhet and style each treat different aspects of the phenomenal process.  The syuzhet embodies the film as a "dramaturgical" process; style embodies is as a "technical" one" (32).

• Gaps can be focused or diffused.  "The syuzhet can also flaunt or suppress gaps in the fabula."  "We can characterize syuzhet processes as working to open, prolong, or close gaps in fabula events." "A focused gap obviously tend to solicit exclusive and homogeneous hypotheses, while a diffuse gap yields room for more open-ended inferential work.  A flaunted gap may warn us to pay attention: either the omitted fabula information will become important later, or the narration is misleading us by stressing something that will prove insignificant" (37).  Art houses will flaunt gaps, ambiguity over continuity.

• Every syuzhet uses retardation to postpone complete construction of the fabula.  This causes curiosity and suspense with the audience.

• "In general, the syuzhet shapes our perception of the fabula by controlling:

  • the quantity of fabula information to which we have access;

  • the degree of pertinence we can attribute to the presented information; and

  • the formal correspondences between syuzhet presentation and fabula data.

• 1st person narratives don't require much exposition.

• Exposition is usually best with 3rd person.

• Preliminary - when we get exposition at beginning of film.

• Delayed - when exposition is held back.

• Mystery exposition information is in the end.

• where exposition information is located guides audience's hypothesis

• Concentrated exposition - information given in a lump in one place.

• Distributed exposition - interweaves information throughout.

• Fairy tale - employs preliminary and concentrated exposition.

• Crime plot - Delayed and concentrated exposition.

• Redundancy - the rue of 3.  If something is important make plot points three times.

• Categories of information transmission:

  • omniscient - highly knowledgeable viewpoint

  • knowledge - judge subjectivity and objectivity

  • self conscience - How aware is the text of its existence as a text

  • communicativeness - style of information transmission, the information that the narrative shares with the audience.

• Tone - judgmental factors.  Wherein the narrative strikes a attitude with either the fabula or the perceiver.

• Seymour Chatman used the classic communication diagram: with a message passed from sender to receiver.