Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

“Twist Blindness” 65the story of the film: a cause-and-effect chain of events which occurs withina given space and time. The syuzhet, on the other hand, is the film’s plot:that is, the sequence of information which is actually presented, potentiallyin an alternative order and with numerous omissions. Employing a constructivistpsychology, Bordwell argues that the film viewer constructs thefabula from the syuzhet by employing schemas (Bartlett 1932). Schemas,from our perspective, are conceptual frameworks which model differentaspects of the world: persons, actions, events, and so forth. An agent-basedschema, for instance, comprises a cluster of characteristics typically associatedwith a given type of person; the schema for doctor includes suchcharacteristics as “educated at medical school,” “intelligent,” “trustworthy,”and “caring.” Significantly, a schema of this nature allows the viewer to “gobeyond the information given” and “fill in the gaps”: if we are told that thecharacter of Malcolm Crowe is a doctor, then we can draw the inferencethat he is intelligent and we can generate the hypothesis that he is caring.In addition, we need to cite the fundamental distinction betweensyuzhet and style, which corresponds roughly to the distinction betweencontent and form. Whereas the syuzhet refers to the narrative in terms ofkey scenes and actions, the style refers to the way in which the narrativeis filmed – notable examples of stylistic techniques include cinematography,editing, lighting, and mise-en-scène. The significant point is thatthe style interacts with the syuzhet in a number of ways: for instance, filmingMalcolm from a low camera angle (an element of form) will contribute tothe impression that he has a high social status (an element of content).The second key question is: How do we remember the people and eventsin fiction film (see Figure 3.1b)? In this chapter, I intend to develop theabove theory by stressing the role of memory – a faculty cited by Bordwell(1985, p. 37) but not described in any detail. 4 Considering that memoryis not photographic in nature, the specific details of a given scene are usuallydiscarded. In the way that we construct the fabula by employing certainschemas, we reconstruct our memories of the fabula by employing thosevery same schemas once again; both the syuzhet and the style (the precisecontent and the precise form) drop out of the equation. Significantly, ifour memories are liable to schematic elaboration, then they are also liableto schematic distortion, a consequence investigated by Elizabeth Loftus (1975)and others in relation to the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The phenomenonof schematic distortion can be demonstrated by appealing to thesimple example of the “restaurant script” (Bower, Black, and Turner 1979,p. 179). If subjects are presented with a story which states that a character,