What is film narratology

Author: (Canada) Godro / (France) Roest / Liu Yunzhou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-10-01
Features: This book was written between 1989 and 1990, when narrative research had already experienced a decade of vigorous development in the field of film. In fact, film narratology had existed earlier, and many experts had published monographs on the subject, clearly establishing the concept of film narratology. Unlike film semiotics, as established by Christian Metz, which primarily aimed to elucidate the essence of the metaphorical "film language," these authors centered their research on understanding film narrative. "How does film represent continuity, progression, the interruption of time, causality, oppositional relationships, spatial distance, and so on—these are the central issues faced by film semiotics." Since the writing and publication of this book, some discussions, sometimes international in scope, have taken place among film narratology scholars, particularly in the early film research field, which holds great inspirational value. This may be because early films were in a state of everything being in an "emerging" state (if one wishes to avoid teleological perspectives), at least in an "primitive" state; early films were single-point-of-view (with only one shot), and regardless of the narrative they presented, they rarely constituted a complete form of narrative, a fully constructed narrative.