Film content
Most audiences first connect to works of film art through the movies’ narrative content. While it was not always a foregone conclusion that cinema would be used to tell stories, its capabilities in that regard took shape early in the silent era, and has become the dominant way we think about the art form. In both fiction and non-fiction film, stories are essential to the art form.
Story
While not all films rely on the exact same structure, it can be fairly easy to see some broad similarities in the kinds of stories they tell. This is especially true when considering mainstream films made in Hollywood and in other cultures around the world that are aimed at the widest possible audiences. Most of those kinds of films tend to order themselves into fairly easy-to-follow plots that focus on characters with goals who face obstacles. By the end of the story, the characters have either achieved those goals or they haven’t, but there is some kind of fairly clear resolution.
Cinema borrows this basic approach from older storytelling art forms like literary fiction and theatre. While those mediums approach storytelling in a variety of ways that are specific to their conventions, cinema is roughly bound by some fairly rigid time constraints. Most movies run about two hours, give or take, which largely resembles the time restrictions of the theatre.
When you think about film stories, you’re really considering plot, which is a series of events that escalate tension until a climactic moment that is then resolved in the film’s last act. This is most easily represented in a diagram that you may have encountered before in your English classes.
A lot of movies will fit pretty easily into this structure. Consider Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Spielberg), the first film to feature Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford). The stellar opening sequence of Raiders establishes the character Indiana Jones as an adventurer and archaeologist who’s clever, tough, and resourceful. This is part of the exposition, but it’s handled in an exciting way by director Steven Spielberg.
The exposition continues into the next sequence, in which Jones is visited by a group of U.S. government officials who ask Jones to find the film’s MacGuffin, the Ark of The Covenant, before the Nazis do. A MacGuffin is a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock that means the thing that all the characters in a story want; it doesn’t really mean anything to the audience, but it drives the narrative and sets the plot in motion. The exposition of Raiders ends when Indiana Jones agrees to the assignment and sets off to Nepal to begin his quest for the Ark. That’s the plot’s inciting incident, which really starts the main narrative.
From this point, a series of events escalate the stakes of the story. First, Indy has to find old flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), who has a clue to the whereabouts of the Ark. The two of them fight off an attack by some Nazi thugs, and set off for Egypt, where they know the Ark is buried, but not its exact location. Marion is kidnapped and thought dead; Indy finds the location of the Ark, but is intercepted by the Nazis and his rival archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman). He rescues Marion and the two escape on a ship, but she is captured by the Nazis once again and taken to an island by submarine. Indy follows, and is taken into Nazi custody when he is unable to destroy the Ark to prevent the Germans from taking full possession of it.
This series of exciting events, complete with fights, chases, and thrills, leads to the film’s climax. Indy and Marion are held captive by the Nazis, who trifle with God’s wrath and open the Ark, which promptly melts their faces and burns them alive. Indy and Marion, who don’t look directly into the Ark, are spared. The dispute between Indy and the Nazis comes to a head in this sequence, featuring substantial special effects—it’s the climactic moment, and it feels like the biggest thing in the movie.
Finally, Indy and Marion return to the U.S. but are dismayed to find out that the government has taken the Ark, which has proven to be incredibly dangerous, into its possession and will not let Jones or other scientists study it. Indy and Marion presumably live happily ever after, and the final vision of the Ark is it being stored in a gigantic warehouse, surrounded by thousands of other boxes containing other apparently dangerous artifacts that should never be opened. The narrative is resolved.
Not all films fit so neatly into the plot diagram or follow the narrative trajectory of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but many mainstream ones produced in Hollywood and around the world do. The medium is very good at telling fairly compact stories in this manner that average out to around two hours or so.
theme
At a deeper level than plot, which is simply what happens and in what order, films also explore themes that are important to the filmmakers behind the work. This is the difference between what happens in a story (plot) and what it’s about—that’s theme.
Films can be about a lot of things. The noir movie Pickup on South Street (1953, Fuller) is about pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), who mistakenly swipes some government secrets being smuggled out of the United States by a Communist spy ring. Though Skip is a small-time crook, he’s still a patriot deep inside, and finds his loyalty to his country (which has made him an outsider) reignited by the thuggish Communists who want to undermine it. Pickup on South Street raises questions about the relationship between an individual and his society; what are the limits of antisocial behavior? Does Skip, who has previously looked out only for himself, have a duty to his country?
It’s important not to think about theme as a film’s message. Most movies aren’t really interested in answering questions or resolving themes, but telling stories that explore complicated tensions. Because movies are the product of collaboration, they are inherently complex; movies don’t represent just one point of view, but many.
The film Dirty Harry (1971, Siegel) is a good example of these tensions. In it, San Francisco police officer Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) hunts a serial killer called Scorpio (Andrew Robinson), who is loosely inspired by the real-life Zodiac Killer. When Harry’s excessive force in apprehending Scorpio leads the District Attorney to release the suspect from jail, Harry says, “Then the law’s crazy,” and turns vigilante to get Scorpio himself. Upon the release of Dirty Harry, some critics reacted very negatively to the film, with The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael going so far as to call it “fascist.”
While Kael is certainly entitled to think Dirty Harry is fascist, she may have fallen into a trap—the film is an exploration of a fascist response to the law’s perceived inadequacies, but not always an endorsement of it. It raises complicated questions about the potential inconsistencies between the law and justice, which are not always synonymous. Most importantly, the film offers counterpoints to Harry’s increasing disgust with the system in which he operates. When Harry learns about Scorpio’s release and suggests he might kill him himself, a cut to a horrified Assistant D.A. offers the audience a chance to question whether Harry is insane or justified.
That’s theme at work. Dirty Harry doesn’t explicitly say that the best thing to do in response to the potential limitations of the law is to take to the streets with a loaded gun and take out any criminals you see; it offers an exploration of that possibility.
Films often establish their themes right away. In the commentary at right, you can watch the opening sequence of The Conversation (1974, Coppola), a conspiracy thriller that is steeped in paranoia. Pay close attention to the ways in which the filmmakers use a variety of formal strategies to communicate the film’s themes to the audience even before the story itself becomes clear. The plot is complex and takes a while to unfold, but what the film is actually about, in a thematic respect, is apparent almost immediately.
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As in any storytelling medium, themes are rich areas of interest for both filmmakers and audiences alike. While many plots can be easily diagrammed into broad similarities, themes are not so easy to reduce. The diversity of themes is why filmmakers can continue telling interesting stories while using familiar plot structures.
Character
The kind of plot can determine theme—or the other way around. Most often, plot and theme are expressed through specific characters. The kinds of characters who appear in stories is often shaped by the kind of story being told; for instance, a Western is likely to feature lawmen and gunslingers, just as a romantic comedy is likely to focus on people looking for love.
Audiences connect to characters through their ability to empathize; certain characters are used as identification vehicles for individual members of the audience. Often, that’s the film’s protagonist, though not always. In the film California Split (1974, Altman), two gamblers, Bill (George Segal) and Charlie (Elliot Gould), are funny, charming, and develop an entertaining friendship that invites audience members to laugh at and along with them.
However, Bill and Charlie are also hopeless gambling addicts who use card games and horse races to keep their own deep unhappiness at bay. They’re often depressed, have very few meaningful relationships to other human beings, and shirk their responsibilities in favor of a day at the track. They’re fun, but after a while, they’re definitely going to test the audience’s patience. Bill and Charlie are easy to identify with until they’re not.
As with theme, character is often established quite early in a film narrative. In the opening sequence of Who’ll Stop The Rain (1978, Reisz), a post-Vietnam War thriller, veteran-turned-drug-smuggler John Converse (Michael Moriarty) reflects on the trauma he has experienced in war, which motivates his decision to ship heroin to the United States in hopes of turning a quick profit. In the commentary at right, I discuss how the film establishes John’s character by placing him in context.
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Point of view is critical to character identification for an audience. In Who’ll Stop The Rain, John’s decision to smuggle heroin out of Vietnam is rooted in what he has come to see as the moral stain of the war.
But in cinema, point of view is highly flexible. Another post-Vietnam film, Heaven and Earth (1993), directed by Oliver Stone, focuses on a Vietnamese woman, Le Ly Hayslip (Hiep Thi Le), who marries American soldier Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones) and returns to the United States with him. Instead of asking us to identify with the morally compromised Converse, Stone’s film seeks our identification with Le Ly, who is astonished by the differences between life in Vietnam and America.
Watch the commentary at right, which explores how Stone’s camera adopts Le Ly’s point of view as she discovers what life in America is like in contrast to her upbringing and struggle in Vietnam. The cinematic focus on abundance demonstrates that not only does Stone’s camera not leave her point of view to privilege Steve, but it affords her the homecoming narrative’s imagery, emphasizing her perspective.
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Films also make decisions about how they feel about individual characters, which shapes our perception of them. In Who’ll Stop The Rain, John’s choice to smuggle heroin is not excused, but explained; in Heaven & Earth, Le Ly’s wonder at seeing such abundance in America may invite members of the audience to see their own country with fresh perspective.
In the gangster film High Sierra (1941), director Raoul Walsh laments the passing of a certain kind of American outlaw into legend. As played by Humphrey Bogart, the character of Roy Earle is a man who no longer has a place in American society; he returns from a long stint in prison at the outset of the film, only to find that the world he left behind has moved on without him. Unable to adapt to the new America, Roy returns to his outlaw ways, masterminding a jewel robbery that goes bad, sending him fleeing into the hills, where he makes his last stand.
In the commentary at right on the conclusion of High Sierra, I explore how Walsh uses various elements of cinema, combined with the performance of Bogart, to romanticize the character of Roy Earle. In presenting an outlaw character in a sympathetic light, Walsh attempts to transfer his own tragic view of Earle to the audience.
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Character, like plot and theme, is one of the foundational building blocks of narrative cinema. Filmmakers use a variety of narrative and formal strategies to create relationships between their stories and the audiences who watch them.
clip quiz - narrative content in film
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011, Ramsay)
What does this scene tell you about Eva (Tilda Swinton), the main character of We Need To Talk About Kevin? Seeing it out of the context of the entire film, what do you learn about her from what happens in this clip? |
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PARIS TEXAS (1984, Wenders)
Describe the relationship between the setting and the character Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) as expressed in this scene from Paris Texas. |
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THELMA & LOUISE (1991, Scott)
What themes reveal themselves in this scene from Thelma & Louise? What major ideas or emotions does this film seem to be interested in? |
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SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950, Wilder)
Early movie scenes communicate expositional information about the story. Make a list of everything you learn about the story in this early scene from Sunset Boulevard. |
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You hurt my feelings - Story, character, theme
The small-scale drama You Hurt My Feelings (2023), written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, is a great argument for the fundamentals of cinematic storytelling—audiences connect to relatable, interesting characters in dramatic situations that seem like something they can recognize from their own lives.
In You Hurt My Feelings, novelist and professor Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) have what seems like a perfect marriage; they love and support each other, and actually seem to enjoy one another’s company, despite a long relationship. Everything is great. At least, until Beth overhears Don saying that he doesn’t actually think her latest book, which has gone through many drafts, is very good, despite having told her that he thinks it is.
There’s no ticking time bomb here. Nobody is on the verge of death. The world is not in danger and in desperate need of saving. You Hurt My Feelings offers a small story about two characters who must renegotiate their relationship in the wake of a violation of trust. The stakes are small in terms of real-world consequences, but they’re pretty high for the two people at the center of that betrayal. Beth and Don may work this little problem out, but it’s hard to imagine that their relationship will go back to the way it was before. That Don doesn’t think Beth’s writing is good is something that she’ll never not know again.
Director Nicole Holofcener specializes in these kinds of small-scale character dramas that are often leavened with comedy that stems from the characters’ insecurities. Beth, though she is a successful novelist and writing teacher, hasn’t had a lot of good luck with her own writing lately, which makes her defensive with her husband and sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), and at moments, indifferent with her own creative writing students. Beth is stuck in a middle-aged rut, lacking in inspiration and unsure of what direction she wants her professional life to take. This is one reason that the revelation that Don doesn’t like her work hurts her so much—she thought she could at least count on her personal relationship, but now, it looks like she can’t even take that for granted.
Don likewise doesn’t seem much interested in his own work as a psychotherapist. In his meetings with his patients, he is inattentive and dismissive, seemingly bored by their problems at best and contemptuous of their pettiness and inability to work it out at worst. While Beth aspires to something better with her writing, Don doesn’t really seem to care about his work at all. His pursuit of a tough love approach with two particularly troublesome patients, the bickering couple Carolyn (Amber Tamblyn) and Jonathan (David Cross), backfires. The only thing the soon-to-be-divorced pair can agree on is that Don isn’t a very good therapist.
The conflict between Beth and Don creates a stage for critical questions about what any of us is looking for in a relationship. Do we want total honesty? Do we want support? What happens when those things are in conflict with one another? These are the film’s key themes, but it doesn’t really come to any specific answer on any of these questions. Its ultimate conclusion seems to be that any relationship is a negotiation between two people that is always ongoing, without any particular long-lasting resolution.
Audiences mostly love movies because of the stories they tell, the themes they explore, and the characters they are invited to spend time with. Narrative tools like these are not exclusive to cinema, of course—they are equally relied on by literature, theatre, and even some poetry. Where cinema really differs is in its reliance on form.