STORY STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

These are basic narrative requirements in any form of story telling. The director D.W. Griffith established the first real visual vocabulary for film in The Birth of a Nation (1915) inventing the close-up shot and the moving camera. In Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles broke all the rules and invented some new ones, fracturing the frame and the narrative with flashbacks and the contradictory stories of different characters.

'Classical' three-act story structure unfolds chronologically, focusing on a central protagonist who experiences conflict in a changing world. The climax or punchline provides emotional and intellectual closure.

There are other alternatives to basic structure, including stories about multiple protagonists whose actions take place in minimalist worlds and offer no closure; e.g. The Big Chill (1983) or Diner (1982) and deliberately anti-structure films like Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975).

Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is a study of truth and human nature; four people involved in a rape/murder tell varying accounts of what happened. Kurosawa also made the films The Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), which were later adapted into the classic Westerns The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

These films revolutionised visual storytelling and their very titles have become part of our language.

There are three approaches to film structure:

• TECTONIC APPROACH: More than a simple record of objects, figures and actions, the process analyzes and breaks them down into their respective parts, rebuilding them so the part relates to the whole in a new way. It is an additive method, both analytical and synthetic; shot is added to shot as in architectural building - the process and its effect are more architectonic than organic. This dialectical method IMPOSES continuity, harmony and contrast.

• THEATRICAL APPROACH: Established in the earliest films and based on stage conventions, the camera takes the vantage point of an observer who watches the scene play out from beginning to end, liking watching a stage play. It OBSERVES continuity, harmony and contrast in the action.

In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles revitalized the theatrical approach, employing an extremely wide-angle lens to maintain sharp focus from foreground to distance. This way he could plot action in depth; create harmony, contrast and tension between foreground, middle distance and distance, directing the viewer's attention from one part of the scene to another as effectively in a single shot as he could by cutting and editing. This is great mise-en-scène.

• ORGANIC APPROACH: In which continuity, harmony and contrast seem to EMERGE out of the action, the narrative, the exposition, or very often the dialogue. A film may exhibit all the resources, processes and expressive forms available and in the interrelationship of parts, be very simple or very complex, strictly rationalised or deliberately informal.