Smu Production 1 Fall 2017

The reading ultimately left me with a feeling of pride, allowing me to not feel foolish for considering cinema a stylized form of art, similar to sculpting and painting. Any fool who considers the filmmaking process trivial and lackluster must consider the complexities of making a film. There's certain mechanics and a science behind it that most take for granted, such as the construction of narrative, and the readings beautifully illustrate that storytelling isn't as simple as it may seem.

In "Narrative as a Formal System," Bordwell exemplifies how each separate part of a film--plot and story, cause and effect, time, space, openings and closings, and the narrator--work together to form a successful narrative. It was very interesting for me to learn about the narrative form of a film and how a story comes together as it is something that I have never gave much thought to. The art of making a film is far more complicated than I thought. Bordwell raised many fascinating points, but what I found most fascinating was how parallelism was used in Citizen Kane . Even though I have never seen the film Citizen Kane, I was able to learn that parallelism in a narrative "allows both lines of action to develop simultaneously in similar directions." I personally have never realized that parallelism can be present in films, and if the viewer isn't actively reading the film, they probably are not going to realize that parallelism present either. Overall, ...