Studies in Film Narrative

18/09/2026

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We might start with narrative expectation. When somebody insists they have a story to tell, we anticipate the telling, hoping it lives up to the claim, without arriving at the tragic. Nobody is going to say that, after hearing how a close relative has a terminal illness, that this was a great story. Yet cinema is full of well-told stories where this is precisely the case: Terms of Endearment, Love Story, My Life Without Me, The Mouth Agape. The films may insist on the hopelessly lachrymose (Love Story) or the stubbornly unsentimental (The Mouth Agape), but all tell stories, and some, like Love Story, have made vast amounts of money deploying the most morbid of subjects. Though one might insist that viewers are no more inclined to seek unhappy endings in film than in their lives, this clearly isn’t the case. Some of the biggest box-office films have the most despairing of outcomes. In Braveheart, William Wallace is hanged, drawn and quartered, while, in contrast, in Rob Roy, Rob defeats a manipulative and destructive fop and returns to his wife. According to Box Office Mojo, Braveheart made $213 million worldwide; the more positive Rob Roy made only $ 31 million. In Titanic, the titular ship careens into an iceberg, and most of the passengers and crew die. Box office returns: $2.2 billion.

This doesn’t mean people seek out cinematic despair, but if the customer believes the film has a story to tell, and tells it with vigour, money often comes rolling in. Hollywood may be famous for the perceived artificiality of its happy endings, but many end bleakly, pragmatically or de,vastatingly: including Casablanca, Now Voyager, and Vertigo. All of them might be defined as tragedies if one accepts the broadest of brushes, and assumes that, just as some claim there are only two stories (somebody arrives; somebody leaves), so there are only two narrative forms: tragedy and comedy. John Gardner more or less offers the former in The Art of Fiction, while it would simplify ancient Greek literature to claim it only offered comedies or tragedies; it also offered the epic and the satyr; Homeric journeys and short, humorous works. Nevertheless, many films do conform to the tragic or comedic template, just as many a film shows someone arriving or leaving – and often doing both, with Shane as good an example as any. In many a western, when the villains are chased out of town, it is because they have unwelcomely arrived in the first place. In Shane, the arrival is fortunate; in High Noon, unfortunate. But in both, the films conform to Gardner’s generalisation, and so do many others. If you make the argument broad enough, this is likely to hold. But it will remove nuance. Just as we can insist Now Voyager and Titanic are tragedies because they don’t have happy endings, as comedies usually do, this is surely too categorical. In Now Voyager, the leading characters accept they can’t be together. But they are both very much alive, and the film seems closer to bittersweet. In Titanic, Jack will disappear into the icy Atlantic, while Rose, many years later, is still alive to tell the tale. What we can say is that Now Voyager and Titanic are weepies, which might appear a weak form of feeling next to the tragic. Yet it better captures the type of feeling out of form the weepie seeks.

Looking at narrative, we can keep in mind the biggest of generalisations, while incorporating the distinctions viewers often make when watching a film. Terms of Endearment has plenty of funny moments, but it isn’t a comedy, just as Annie Hall ends at least as pessimistically as Now Voyager, though nobody is going to suggest Allen’s film is a tragedy, nor even a weepie. While attending to specific scenes in four films that exemplify different approaches to narrative, we can also keep in mind other useful claims: Hitchcock’s that there are story directors and character directors, Jean Renoir’s belief that everyone has their reasons. We can think too of David Bordwell’s belief that art films function dramatically differently from Hollywood films, and Robert McKee’s assumption that “true character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.” (Story)

By focusing on particular moments, we can stress test some of these claims, incorporate others, and always acknowledge that any idea is an encapsulation of burgeoning feeling, an aggregate of complexity distilled into sense. So let us start with North by Northwest. Early in the film, the central character, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), has been mistaken for someone called George Kaplan, kidnapped, interrogated and almost killed. He discovers that the person who interrogated him works at the UN and turns up, hoping to discover more about Townsend. Though Hitchcock is a great director of chase sequences and crosscutting, in the scene we will analyse, he invokes the chase but chooses not to focus upon it. As Thornhill asks the taxi driver to take him to the UN, he adds that he is being tailed, and wonders if there is anything the driver can do about it. The driver says, yes, he can. Yet Hitchcock doesn’t show us a chase; he promptly dissolves into a long, low-angle shot of the United Nations building. We then observe Thornhill getting out of the cab. Why hasn’t Hitchcock shown us the chase sequence he seems to have promised? There are at least two reasons. One is that he will offer plenty of chase sequences in various forms later: Thornhill escaping onto a train, running from a plane that attacks him as he hides in the fields, and clambering around Mt. Rushmore as he escapes the villain. Hitchcock may love a chase, but he wouldn’t want the viewer bored by too many. Secondly, what matters at this moment isn’t only, or especially, escape. Thornhill wants to tidy up the confusion over his mistaken identity, and so do we. The most important narrative component is Thornhill trying to find out why people think he is George Kaplan. He wants to confront the man who kidnapped him at the United Nations. Thornhill may find himself followed, but he is also, in his own way, doing the chasing.

Hitchcock offers shots that play up the size of the UN headquarters. It isn’t only the establishing shot that he dissolves into; it is also there when Thornhill enters the building. Here he is, somewhere within this extreme long shot that captures the curvature of the interiors, like something out of Gaudi, as Hitchcock asks us to seek Thornhill out in the frame when he crosses the building’s foyer. The shots of the UN give the impression that this is a story bigger than one man’s enquiry, and manage to combine the director’s ongoing fascination with mistaken identity (The 39 Steps, The Wrong Man, and The Man Who Knew Too Much), with a hint of paranoia that would take architectural form in later films like Klute, and The Parallax View.

It turns out that while Thornhill is being taken for Kaplan, the person who was behind the kidnapping has been deliberately masquerading as another man. When Thornhill meets the real Townsend, he looks nothing like the man he’d previously met, the one who kidnapped him. As Thornhill shows him a photo of the other man claiming to be him, Townsend looks aghast, only for Thornhill to recognise very promptly that this is because Townsend has a knife in his back. Everybody assumes Thornhill is the killer. The film then introduces a hint of a chase sequence as Thornhill escapes the scene of the crime. In a marvellous overhead shot, one sees this tiny figure running into a taxi. On the left-hand side of the frame stands the imposing UN building, as Hitchcock reverses the low angle that we saw a few moments earlier: a scene he repeats when the secondary villain exits a taxi himself,  the villain who goes on to kill the real Townsend.

In the UN sequence, we can say the plot certainly thickens. It takes place a third of the way through the film, and Thornhill doesn’t just discover that another man is pretending to be Townsend, but that he is also now going to be seen as his murderer. The story becomes a man- on-the-run film, and he is now in trouble with both the police and the gang who kidnapped him. Yet he also wants to find out why he has been mistaken for Kaplan; why a man has been impersonating Townsend. Yet if Hitchcock was famous for being the master of suspense, it also rested on giving visual form to the intricacy of storytelling. He manages both to forewarn and disarm simultaneously. When the director pans from Thornhill waiting for Townsend to this villain we have seen much earlier in the film, and in a similar shot where the camera darts across to him, the viewer expects trouble. But it is unlikely one will assume Townsend will be killed; more likely, one would expect an attack on Thornhill, and that he will survive. Hitchcock thickens the plot by creating an expectation of drama, but thickens it again by the expectation that Thornhill will now be a man wanted by everybody. Yet Hitchcock also disarms us, partly by keeping things light.

We might say that Thornhill is in a tragic situation, but how can Hitchcock turn it into a comedic one – turn the film from an encompassing despair into an eventually happy ending? The typical paranoid thriller made a decade and a half later (The Parallax View, The Conversation, and Chinatown) incorporated unequivocal despondency. Hitchcock wants the murkiest of plots to give way to a crystal-clear optimism. In time, he will receive help from Eve Kendall (Eva Marie-Saint), whom he takes as a lover, then realises she is apparently his foe, and Townsend-impersonator Phillip Van Damm’s mistress, only to discover that she is a secret agent for the US government, and simply as close to Van Damm as she needs to be to infiltrate his network. By the end, Thornhill and Kendall will be negotiating Mt. Rushmore as they escape. In a famous match-cut, Thornhill pulls Kendall up as she hangs from the cliff, and pulls his now-wife up onto the train bunk.

The plot may thicken, but Hitchcock thins it out, as he turns it into a romantic adventure. The film becomes an opportunity for Thornhill and Kendall to meet and fall in love, and the very thing that sets the story in motion becomes an irrelevance. The various characters may be after an important microfilm, but we don’t find out what is on it, because it isn’t important to the film’s final, optimistic throughline. It is what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something that sets the story in motion and, while important to the characters, is of no final significance to the viewer.

If Hitchcock saw himself as a story director rather than a character director, it rested partly on his interest in creating characters that are often fluidly not themselves. They are caught in exceptional circumstances, and this is a variation of McKee’s claim that the character's essential nature is revealed through an extreme situation. The situation Thornhill finds himself in is exceptional, but we might wonder whether his character is revealed in it. The events that the leading figures in 1970s films such as Five Easy Pieces, Breezy, Alice in the Cities, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore are far less dramatic, yet are more inclined to be regarded as character studies than many a Hitchcock film. (Perhaps the only one where character was more important than plot was Vertigo.) If Hitchcock is right that he wanted drama to tell a story rather than reveal character, and thus saw himself as a story director, then he seemed to understand that big events don’t necessarily reveal character. In Five Easy Pieces, etc., we are intrigued by character; in North by Northwest, we are engaged in the story, as it moves from an espionage thriller to a romantic drama, leaving a fretful viewer for much of the film worrying about Thornhill’s immediate future. By the end, we know that it will be a long-term future in the loving arms of Eve. Whatever emotional baggage this man has brought into the relationship (divorces, kids, an inability to commit), they are all irrelevant.

Jack Nicholson in the early 1970s was known for his character parts rather than appearing in plot-driven films: Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens, and The Last Detail. He may have got into fights in Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail, but this hardly made him an action star. More like someone looking to take his frustrations out on others. Yet it would be difficult to claim Chinatown is a character study when it has one of the most famously brilliant and serpentine plots in cinema. McKee and other scriptwriting gurus use Robert Towne’s script as an exemplification of the well-structured story.  However, director Roman Polanski has always been more ambivalent than Hitchcock about whether the story is more important than the character. In Rosemary’s Baby, he leans towards story, as her husband and others plot behind Rosemary’s back. In Repulsion, he leans towards character, as Carol loses her mind when she spends too much time alone. In Chinatown, we know little about the central character JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), but we are aware that something happened in Chinatown, and the film returns full circle to the place of the former tragedy. He will try to save the life of one woman, only for it to echo the past when he couldn’t save that of another. If North by Northwest is a potential tragedy that becomes a comedy, Chinatown is about as close to a tragedy as cinema gets, with Oedipus Rex a clear reference point: the incest theme as Evelyn Mulwray confesses to Gittes that her daughter is also her sister, the blindness of Gittes as he cannot quite see what is in front of his eyes, and a remorseless ending that denies any hope. North by Northwest could have turned tragic as many paranoiac films do, but Hitchcock keeps the viewer engaged rather than fretful, more interested in what will happen next, over how terrible Thornhill’s predicament happens to be. In Chinatown, the tension is of a different sort, with Gittes a calculating intelligence that nevertheless cannot see the worst until it is too late. He possesses far more deductive intelligence than Thornhill, since as a detective this is the nature of his job. But that archetypal world-weary cynicism of the private eye cannot quite countenance the worst; perhaps partly because a detective isn’t only experienced in inference, but also in witnessing adultery, corruption and violence. What could surprise Gittes? Hasn’t he already seen it all?

In the scene where Evelyn confesses that the same person is her sister and her daughter, it works as an example of what Aristotle calls anagnorosis. It is also, at the same time, peripeteia. Anagnorosis is recognition; peripeteia, a turning point. In this scene, both are evident as Gittes quizzes Evelyn about details that don’t quite add up. Her husband apparently drowned in a freshwater lake where his body was discovered. But the coroner’s report showed that Hollis had salt water in his lungs, and Gittes has found his glasses in the salt water pond at the back of the Mulwrays’ residence. He says he wants the truth, but in a variation of a famous scene in a later Nicholson film (A Few Good Men), Gittes cannot handle the truth. He sees nothing but contradiction as Evelyn says the person Gittes had seen Evelyn comforting is her daughter, then says she is her sister, and again, her daughter. Gittes slaps her several times and then pushes her onto the couch, before Evelyn says she is my sister and my daughter. Such a claim goes against deductive reasoning, as Aristotle once more comes to mind. As Robin Smith says, “In general, Aristotle holds, exactly one member of any contradiction is true and one false: they cannot both be true, and they cannot both be false.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Gittes is a man who works on the assumption that if someone is found with saltwater in his lungs, and yet appears to have died in fresh water, this is a contradiction, and the truth lies in dissolving the incompatible. However, while this allows him to work out that Hollis died on the premises, and not at the lake, when he discovers that Katherine is both her sister and her daughter, it becomes doubly outrageous: it defies logic and reveals a moral abyss.

One way of thinking about story versus character is that, if a person in the film is a cause of investigative mystery, rather than an observational enigma, there is a good chance we are in a film that emphasises story over character. Our purpose as a viewer isn’t to observe Evelyn, but to see her chiefly through the detective’s deductive eyes. He wants to understand her actions through cues and clues, which is why many a noir has a complicated plot, in a variation of another of Hitchcock’s claims that “the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture” (Hitchcock). In noir, this could be tweaked to indicate that “the more complicated the villain, the more elaborate the plot will be. Though Eve possesses aspects of a femme fatale in North by Northwest, when it looks like she is playing him along, and appears to be Van Damm’s lover, this is quickly resolved and functions as no more than a brief moment of resentment on Thornhill’s part. In Chinatown, the film relies much more on Evelyn’s understandable duplicity. She shares the plotting of a femme fatale, but the motives are different. She isn’t shamelessly trying to make a buck; she is shamefully trying to hide her past. There is more to Chinatown than the complex behaviour of Evelyn. There is also the monstrous ambition of her father. Gittes asks him, “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Noah Cross replies: “The future Mr Gittes, the future.” Part of that future rests on abusing his daughter and his granddaughter. “My father and I….” Evelyn says to Jake. “Do you understand? Or is too tough for you?” It might be too tough for Evelyn as well, as she doesn’t finish her sentence. The scene reveals both Evelyn’s past and her father’s capacity to do whatever he needs to do to own the future. Whether this is producing further generations from his own semen, or controlling the LA water supply as he buys off various authorities, Polanski’s film asks us to imagine the worst.

Chinatown would seem unequivocally despairing, making clear that, if many a film falls into the comedic or the tragic, possessing a happy ending or an unhappy one, there are degrees. Bicycle Thieves also ends unhappily, but the film concludes with a sense of dismay rather than abject hopelessness. In post-war impoverished Italy, Antonio Ricci is offered a chance putting up advertising bills, but needs a bike for the job. Shortly afterwards, the bike is stolen, and for the rest of the film he searches Rome with his son looking for it. Director Vittorio De Sica hangs this story on an exploration of the city, and relies strongly on containing Ricci within the milieu. The tale rests on the bike, but the poverty resides in a city where many will be equally poor. We see it early on as people clamber for a job along with Ricci, and as his search for the bike becomes, at the same time, an exploration of the streets of Rome, and of people’s struggles. If Gittes could say to Cross what can you buy that you can’t already, no such claim would be made about most of the characters here. What sits behind most of them is their impoverishment, but why Ricci is our central character rests on his attempt to make enough for his family, and for those hopes to be promptly dashed. Yet De Sica insists that though this is Ricci’s story, it is a tale of Rome, and we see this well in the scene where Ricci believes he has spotted the bike thief. As he and his son chase after him, the film offers the scene in long takes and distant framing. We see it when the characters enter a panning shot, and instead of moving in on Ricci’s face, or crosscutting to the boy on the bike, De Sica remains slightly removed as Ricci and his son walk back towards the camera. One senses that De Sica never wants to reduce the suspense to a narrative device, when what matters is holding to the broader world of poverty. Often using a low angle in the scene, and with characters moving indifferently through the space, as we are aware there is nothing exceptional about Ricci’s circumstances, the film balances well the need to tell a story, which suggests the uncommon, and registering the idea that Ricci’s circumstances in post-war Italy would be very common indeed.

The film became perhaps the best-known example of neo-realism, a movement that wished to explore and give dignity to everyday lives, without pressing them into narrative demand. Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini reckoned, “The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realised that the necessity of the ‘story’ was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts.” (‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’) How to make images do more than serve the story? Politically, this would be by making sure the tale dealt with social deprivation. This is honourable. But not quite aesthetic. It wouldn’t quite pass in using the medium of film for an exploration of daily life. It would risk turning it into a propaganda tool. De Sica and Zavattini insist on the balance between detailing the quotidian, without reducing the film to a documentary of the poor in Rome. They do so by adding a story that the viewer engages with on the level of empathy rather than pity. If De Sica and Zavattini had chosen pity, they could have shown us the poor Italy they do show us, but the film wouldn’t have been driven by the characters’ specific anxiety. It would have been a general despair. While Ricci and his family are generally without means, they are specifically without a bicycle, and the film shows us the ongoing search, while containing within that search many others whose situation isn’t much better. By combining the quest for the bike with the milieu in which it has gone missing, De Sica successfully registers the importance of narrative for Ricci, as he determines to find the missing bicycle while, at the same time, showing the destitution we see. This isn’t something he would be noticing; what Ricci would see are others competing for resources, as we notice at the beginning of the film, when Ricci gets the job over numerous fellow unemployed. In the scene where Ricci believes he has spotted the thief and chases after him, for us to be aware only of the poverty would be to miss the point. But to focus exclusively on the chase would be to ignore the importance of the mise en scene that helped define a movement. One watches the film as a time capsule of its moment, an immediate post-war world where Italy’s Fascist government has lost the war and a new form of governance must be created that won’t allow another descent into Fascism. We see it in the new housing that is going up, but it would take more than a decade for Italy to become prosperous, and this is centrally, sociologically, the difference between De Sica’s film, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse. But out of this difference come many others, including a very different approach to narrative.

While we have noticed that in Bicycle Thieves the milieu becomes more pronounced than we would usually expect from a Hollywood film. No matter the marvellous use of the United Nations building in North by Northwest, and the use of LA as a city ripe for corruption in Chinatown, when water can be exploited in what amounts to a desert, the story is strong. In The Eclipse, the story so recedes that we are left with the specifics of the environment Antonioni films. If Gardner insisted that most good stories have someone coming or someone leaving, and Robert McKee believed that stories are best when characters are pushed to extremes, we could say The Eclipse doesn’t have much of a story. Nevertheless, the central character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is in crisis. She leaves her boyfriend at the beginning of the film and takes up with a stock trader, but neither appear to feel that much for each other, and in the well-known closing scene, we have a series of shots where we might expect to see them, but where both fail to turn up. This captures several things. The casual luxury of a life that means people needn’t make strong commitments, the difficulty in making decisions when one’s crisis is personal rather than, say, financial, political/and or villainously induced, and a filmmaker’s ability to take a crisis that might seem like a non-event to Thornhill, Gittes and Ricci, and turn it into a fresh aesthetic experience.

One could argue that filmmakers often make it easy on themselves by making the crisis categorical. Rather than McKee’s claim that extreme situations reveal character, they more readily reveal screenwriting mechanics. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it is a thing, and when given a choice between saving the house from falling off a cliff or buying a pint of milk from the shop, the character is hardly going to spend much time thinking about what ought to be the priority. To save your kidnapped daughter, to avert a nuclear crisis, to try and rescue a towering inferno, tends to concentrate the mind. But it isn’t likely to reveal personality as choice.  Such films don’t quite allow for character studies.

Often to earn such a moniker, a film will have characters facing difficult decisions but rarely monumental ones, and often choices that can seem on a par with others available. In Shoot the Moon, is Albert’s Finney’s writer finally any happier with his new lover than his former wife? Is his former wife, played by Diane Keaton, more content with her new man than her destructive and selfish, but still loved husband, and the father of their four children? Though the husband is a reckless and self-absorbed presence, he isn’t the ex from hell who must be killed in the denouement, even if some viewers, exasperated by his behaviour, might wish he would meet a suitable demise. (He is beaten up and humiliated.) But in Alan Parker’s best film, Parker hasn’t made a work about a dangerous man, but a foolish one, and the movie concerns itself with choices that could easily not have been made but were, and the consequences to all concerned. Yet next to The Eclipse, Shoot the Moon looks like a melodrama, as though Antonioni wanted to see what would happen when choices carry no urgency, and all of them seem equally futile. How can one build a narrative around this? The answer is, to some degree, you can’t, just as at the opposite extreme (kidnapped daughter; towering infernos) it is hard not to do so. While the scene at the beginning captures very well Vittoria’s indecisiveness as she prepares to leave her boyfriend, as she fiddles around with objects and moves through space as if somebody else ought to be able to move it just as well, by the end of the film, she doesn’t turn up for the rendezvous we invoked, and neither does her new boyfriend Riccardo (Alain Delon). If Antonioni, more than most, introduced an undecidable body language that could leave characters stranded in their own decision-making, he pushes things further in the closing scene of The Eclipse by showing that this inability to act has destroyed the film’s very conclusion.

We might not be surprised by their decision, but we will be surprised by Antonioni’s: to film the locations without them, as if to say that he isn’t only willing to make a work without a story, but is willing to conclude without characters as well. There are people in these series of shots, as we see a person reading a newspaper as he gets off the bus, others waiting to get on public transport, and kids playing on the street. But the emphasis rests on the emptiness, because we have become used to such people becoming no more than background filler as we focus on central characters. When those characters become peripheral, or there are too many of them (as we sometimes notice, for example, in Robert Altman’s films like Nashville and A Wedding), it can become disorienting, if not quite disconcerting. In the disorienting we can reorientate, and this is central to Altman’s aesthetic.  In The Eclipse, it disconcerts because no amount of orienting can lead us back to the story. Antonioni has obliterated it, and instigated a new form. It leaves us with a question. If the absence of story can generate original forms, does storytelling demand obvious visual formulations? That seems a claim too far, and one reason why we have looked at the UN scene in North by Northwest is that it combines fine storytelling with great visual astuteness. Hitchcock may have been a story director, but he usually wanted to keep his images fresh, even startling. Yet he also knew he was contained (rather than constrained) by storytelling. Antonioni more than most accepted the medium of film as one that usually tells a story, but always took this claim with scepticism. He used this doubt to produce images that weren’t beholden to the tale, but to expand the medium’s possibilities.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Narrative

We might start with narrative expectation. When somebody insists they have a story to tell, we anticipate the telling, hoping it lives up to the claim, without arriving at the tragic. Nobody is going to say that, after hearing how a close relative has a terminal illness, that this was a great story. Yet cinema is full of well-told stories where this is precisely the case: Terms of Endearment, Love Story, My Life Without Me, The Mouth Agape. The films may insist on the hopelessly lachrymose (Love Story) or the stubbornly unsentimental (The Mouth Agape), but all tell stories, and some, like Love Story, have made vast amounts of money deploying the most morbid of subjects. Though one might insist that viewers are no more inclined to seek unhappy endings in film than in their lives, this clearly isn’t the case. Some of the biggest box-office films have the most despairing of outcomes. In Braveheart, William Wallace is hanged, drawn and quartered, while, in contrast, in Rob Roy, Rob defeats a manipulative and destructive fop and returns to his wife. According to Box Office Mojo, Braveheart made $213 million worldwide; the more positive Rob Roy made only $ 31 million. In Titanic, the titular ship careens into an iceberg, and most of the passengers and crew die. Box office returns: $2.2 billion.

This doesn’t mean people seek out cinematic despair, but if the customer believes the film has a story to tell, and tells it with vigour, money often comes rolling in. Hollywood may be famous for the perceived artificiality of its happy endings, but many end bleakly, pragmatically or de,vastatingly: including Casablanca, Now Voyager, and Vertigo. All of them might be defined as tragedies if one accepts the broadest of brushes, and assumes that, just as some claim there are only two stories (somebody arrives; somebody leaves), so there are only two narrative forms: tragedy and comedy. John Gardner more or less offers the former in The Art of Fiction, while it would simplify ancient Greek literature to claim it only offered comedies or tragedies; it also offered the epic and the satyr; Homeric journeys and short, humorous works. Nevertheless, many films do conform to the tragic or comedic template, just as many a film shows someone arriving or leaving – and often doing both, with Shane as good an example as any. In many a western, when the villains are chased out of town, it is because they have unwelcomely arrived in the first place. In Shane, the arrival is fortunate; in High Noon, unfortunate. But in both, the films conform to Gardner’s generalisation, and so do many others. If you make the argument broad enough, this is likely to hold. But it will remove nuance. Just as we can insist Now Voyager and Titanic are tragedies because they don’t have happy endings, as comedies usually do, this is surely too categorical. In Now Voyager, the leading characters accept they can’t be together. But they are both very much alive, and the film seems closer to bittersweet. In Titanic, Jack will disappear into the icy Atlantic, while Rose, many years later, is still alive to tell the tale. What we can say is that Now Voyager and Titanic are weepies, which might appear a weak form of feeling next to the tragic. Yet it better captures the type of feeling out of form the weepie seeks.

Looking at narrative, we can keep in mind the biggest of generalisations, while incorporating the distinctions viewers often make when watching a film. Terms of Endearment has plenty of funny moments, but it isn’t a comedy, just as Annie Hall ends at least as pessimistically as Now Voyager, though nobody is going to suggest Allen’s film is a tragedy, nor even a weepie. While attending to specific scenes in four films that exemplify different approaches to narrative, we can also keep in mind other useful claims: Hitchcock’s that there are story directors and character directors, Jean Renoir’s belief that everyone has their reasons. We can think too of David Bordwell’s belief that art films function dramatically differently from Hollywood films, and Robert McKee’s assumption that “true character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.” (Story)

By focusing on particular moments, we can stress test some of these claims, incorporate others, and always acknowledge that any idea is an encapsulation of burgeoning feeling, an aggregate of complexity distilled into sense. So let us start with North by Northwest. Early in the film, the central character, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), has been mistaken for someone called George Kaplan, kidnapped, interrogated and almost killed. He discovers that the person who interrogated him works at the UN and turns up, hoping to discover more about Townsend. Though Hitchcock is a great director of chase sequences and crosscutting, in the scene we will analyse, he invokes the chase but chooses not to focus upon it. As Thornhill asks the taxi driver to take him to the UN, he adds that he is being tailed, and wonders if there is anything the driver can do about it. The driver says, yes, he can. Yet Hitchcock doesn’t show us a chase; he promptly dissolves into a long, low-angle shot of the United Nations building. We then observe Thornhill getting out of the cab. Why hasn’t Hitchcock shown us the chase sequence he seems to have promised? There are at least two reasons. One is that he will offer plenty of chase sequences in various forms later: Thornhill escaping onto a train, running from a plane that attacks him as he hides in the fields, and clambering around Mt. Rushmore as he escapes the villain. Hitchcock may love a chase, but he wouldn’t want the viewer bored by too many. Secondly, what matters at this moment isn’t only, or especially, escape. Thornhill wants to tidy up the confusion over his mistaken identity, and so do we. The most important narrative component is Thornhill trying to find out why people think he is George Kaplan. He wants to confront the man who kidnapped him at the United Nations. Thornhill may find himself followed, but he is also, in his own way, doing the chasing.

Hitchcock offers shots that play up the size of the UN headquarters. It isn’t only the establishing shot that he dissolves into; it is also there when Thornhill enters the building. Here he is, somewhere within this extreme long shot that captures the curvature of the interiors, like something out of Gaudi, as Hitchcock asks us to seek Thornhill out in the frame when he crosses the building’s foyer. The shots of the UN give the impression that this is a story bigger than one man’s enquiry, and manage to combine the director’s ongoing fascination with mistaken identity (The 39 Steps, The Wrong Man, and The Man Who Knew Too Much), with a hint of paranoia that would take architectural form in later films like Klute, and The Parallax View.

It turns out that while Thornhill is being taken for Kaplan, the person who was behind the kidnapping has been deliberately masquerading as another man. When Thornhill meets the real Townsend, he looks nothing like the man he’d previously met, the one who kidnapped him. As Thornhill shows him a photo of the other man claiming to be him, Townsend looks aghast, only for Thornhill to recognise very promptly that this is because Townsend has a knife in his back. Everybody assumes Thornhill is the killer. The film then introduces a hint of a chase sequence as Thornhill escapes the scene of the crime. In a marvellous overhead shot, one sees this tiny figure running into a taxi. On the left-hand side of the frame stands the imposing UN building, as Hitchcock reverses the low angle that we saw a few moments earlier: a scene he repeats when the secondary villain exits a taxi himself,  the villain who goes on to kill the real Townsend.

In the UN sequence, we can say the plot certainly thickens. It takes place a third of the way through the film, and Thornhill doesn’t just discover that another man is pretending to be Townsend, but that he is also now going to be seen as his murderer. The story becomes a man- on-the-run film, and he is now in trouble with both the police and the gang who kidnapped him. Yet he also wants to find out why he has been mistaken for Kaplan; why a man has been impersonating Townsend. Yet if Hitchcock was famous for being the master of suspense, it also rested on giving visual form to the intricacy of storytelling. He manages both to forewarn and disarm simultaneously. When the director pans from Thornhill waiting for Townsend to this villain we have seen much earlier in the film, and in a similar shot where the camera darts across to him, the viewer expects trouble. But it is unlikely one will assume Townsend will be killed; more likely, one would expect an attack on Thornhill, and that he will survive. Hitchcock thickens the plot by creating an expectation of drama, but thickens it again by the expectation that Thornhill will now be a man wanted by everybody. Yet Hitchcock also disarms us, partly by keeping things light.

We might say that Thornhill is in a tragic situation, but how can Hitchcock turn it into a comedic one – turn the film from an encompassing despair into an eventually happy ending? The typical paranoid thriller made a decade and a half later (The Parallax View, The Conversation, and Chinatown) incorporated unequivocal despondency. Hitchcock wants the murkiest of plots to give way to a crystal-clear optimism. In time, he will receive help from Eve Kendall (Eva Marie-Saint), whom he takes as a lover, then realises she is apparently his foe, and Townsend-impersonator Phillip Van Damm’s mistress, only to discover that she is a secret agent for the US government, and simply as close to Van Damm as she needs to be to infiltrate his network. By the end, Thornhill and Kendall will be negotiating Mt. Rushmore as they escape. In a famous match-cut, Thornhill pulls Kendall up as she hangs from the cliff, and pulls his now-wife up onto the train bunk.

The plot may thicken, but Hitchcock thins it out, as he turns it into a romantic adventure. The film becomes an opportunity for Thornhill and Kendall to meet and fall in love, and the very thing that sets the story in motion becomes an irrelevance. The various characters may be after an important microfilm, but we don’t find out what is on it, because it isn’t important to the film’s final, optimistic throughline. It is what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something that sets the story in motion and, while important to the characters, is of no final significance to the viewer.

If Hitchcock saw himself as a story director rather than a character director, it rested partly on his interest in creating characters that are often fluidly not themselves. They are caught in exceptional circumstances, and this is a variation of McKee’s claim that the character's essential nature is revealed through an extreme situation. The situation Thornhill finds himself in is exceptional, but we might wonder whether his character is revealed in it. The events that the leading figures in 1970s films such as Five Easy Pieces, Breezy, Alice in the Cities, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore are far less dramatic, yet are more inclined to be regarded as character studies than many a Hitchcock film. (Perhaps the only one where character was more important than plot was Vertigo.) If Hitchcock is right that he wanted drama to tell a story rather than reveal character, and thus saw himself as a story director, then he seemed to understand that big events don’t necessarily reveal character. In Five Easy Pieces, etc., we are intrigued by character; in North by Northwest, we are engaged in the story, as it moves from an espionage thriller to a romantic drama, leaving a fretful viewer for much of the film worrying about Thornhill’s immediate future. By the end, we know that it will be a long-term future in the loving arms of Eve. Whatever emotional baggage this man has brought into the relationship (divorces, kids, an inability to commit), they are all irrelevant.

Jack Nicholson in the early 1970s was known for his character parts rather than appearing in plot-driven films: Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens, and The Last Detail. He may have got into fights in Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail, but this hardly made him an action star. More like someone looking to take his frustrations out on others. Yet it would be difficult to claim Chinatown is a character study when it has one of the most famously brilliant and serpentine plots in cinema. McKee and other scriptwriting gurus use Robert Towne’s script as an exemplification of the well-structured story.  However, director Roman Polanski has always been more ambivalent than Hitchcock about whether the story is more important than the character. In Rosemary’s Baby, he leans towards story, as her husband and others plot behind Rosemary’s back. In Repulsion, he leans towards character, as Carol loses her mind when she spends too much time alone. In Chinatown, we know little about the central character JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), but we are aware that something happened in Chinatown, and the film returns full circle to the place of the former tragedy. He will try to save the life of one woman, only for it to echo the past when he couldn’t save that of another. If North by Northwest is a potential tragedy that becomes a comedy, Chinatown is about as close to a tragedy as cinema gets, with Oedipus Rex a clear reference point: the incest theme as Evelyn Mulwray confesses to Gittes that her daughter is also her sister, the blindness of Gittes as he cannot quite see what is in front of his eyes, and a remorseless ending that denies any hope. North by Northwest could have turned tragic as many paranoiac films do, but Hitchcock keeps the viewer engaged rather than fretful, more interested in what will happen next, over how terrible Thornhill’s predicament happens to be. In Chinatown, the tension is of a different sort, with Gittes a calculating intelligence that nevertheless cannot see the worst until it is too late. He possesses far more deductive intelligence than Thornhill, since as a detective this is the nature of his job. But that archetypal world-weary cynicism of the private eye cannot quite countenance the worst; perhaps partly because a detective isn’t only experienced in inference, but also in witnessing adultery, corruption and violence. What could surprise Gittes? Hasn’t he already seen it all?

In the scene where Evelyn confesses that the same person is her sister and her daughter, it works as an example of what Aristotle calls anagnorosis. It is also, at the same time, peripeteia. Anagnorosis is recognition; peripeteia, a turning point. In this scene, both are evident as Gittes quizzes Evelyn about details that don’t quite add up. Her husband apparently drowned in a freshwater lake where his body was discovered. But the coroner’s report showed that Hollis had salt water in his lungs, and Gittes has found his glasses in the salt water pond at the back of the Mulwrays’ residence. He says he wants the truth, but in a variation of a famous scene in a later Nicholson film (A Few Good Men), Gittes cannot handle the truth. He sees nothing but contradiction as Evelyn says the person Gittes had seen Evelyn comforting is her daughter, then says she is her sister, and again, her daughter. Gittes slaps her several times and then pushes her onto the couch, before Evelyn says she is my sister and my daughter. Such a claim goes against deductive reasoning, as Aristotle once more comes to mind. As Robin Smith says, “In general, Aristotle holds, exactly one member of any contradiction is true and one false: they cannot both be true, and they cannot both be false.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Gittes is a man who works on the assumption that if someone is found with saltwater in his lungs, and yet appears to have died in fresh water, this is a contradiction, and the truth lies in dissolving the incompatible. However, while this allows him to work out that Hollis died on the premises, and not at the lake, when he discovers that Katherine is both her sister and her daughter, it becomes doubly outrageous: it defies logic and reveals a moral abyss.

One way of thinking about story versus character is that, if a person in the film is a cause of investigative mystery, rather than an observational enigma, there is a good chance we are in a film that emphasises story over character. Our purpose as a viewer isn’t to observe Evelyn, but to see her chiefly through the detective’s deductive eyes. He wants to understand her actions through cues and clues, which is why many a noir has a complicated plot, in a variation of another of Hitchcock’s claims that “the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture” (Hitchcock). In noir, this could be tweaked to indicate that “the more complicated the villain, the more elaborate the plot will be. Though Eve possesses aspects of a femme fatale in North by Northwest, when it looks like she is playing him along, and appears to be Van Damm’s lover, this is quickly resolved and functions as no more than a brief moment of resentment on Thornhill’s part. In Chinatown, the film relies much more on Evelyn’s understandable duplicity. She shares the plotting of a femme fatale, but the motives are different. She isn’t shamelessly trying to make a buck; she is shamefully trying to hide her past. There is more to Chinatown than the complex behaviour of Evelyn. There is also the monstrous ambition of her father. Gittes asks him, “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Noah Cross replies: “The future Mr Gittes, the future.” Part of that future rests on abusing his daughter and his granddaughter. “My father and I….” Evelyn says to Jake. “Do you understand? Or is too tough for you?” It might be too tough for Evelyn as well, as she doesn’t finish her sentence. The scene reveals both Evelyn’s past and her father’s capacity to do whatever he needs to do to own the future. Whether this is producing further generations from his own semen, or controlling the LA water supply as he buys off various authorities, Polanski’s film asks us to imagine the worst.

Chinatown would seem unequivocally despairing, making clear that, if many a film falls into the comedic or the tragic, possessing a happy ending or an unhappy one, there are degrees. Bicycle Thieves also ends unhappily, but the film concludes with a sense of dismay rather than abject hopelessness. In post-war impoverished Italy, Antonio Ricci is offered a chance putting up advertising bills, but needs a bike for the job. Shortly afterwards, the bike is stolen, and for the rest of the film he searches Rome with his son looking for it. Director Vittorio De Sica hangs this story on an exploration of the city, and relies strongly on containing Ricci within the milieu. The tale rests on the bike, but the poverty resides in a city where many will be equally poor. We see it early on as people clamber for a job along with Ricci, and as his search for the bike becomes, at the same time, an exploration of the streets of Rome, and of people’s struggles. If Gittes could say to Cross what can you buy that you can’t already, no such claim would be made about most of the characters here. What sits behind most of them is their impoverishment, but why Ricci is our central character rests on his attempt to make enough for his family, and for those hopes to be promptly dashed. Yet De Sica insists that though this is Ricci’s story, it is a tale of Rome, and we see this well in the scene where Ricci believes he has spotted the bike thief. As he and his son chase after him, the film offers the scene in long takes and distant framing. We see it when the characters enter a panning shot, and instead of moving in on Ricci’s face, or crosscutting to the boy on the bike, De Sica remains slightly removed as Ricci and his son walk back towards the camera. One senses that De Sica never wants to reduce the suspense to a narrative device, when what matters is holding to the broader world of poverty. Often using a low angle in the scene, and with characters moving indifferently through the space, as we are aware there is nothing exceptional about Ricci’s circumstances, the film balances well the need to tell a story, which suggests the uncommon, and registering the idea that Ricci’s circumstances in post-war Italy would be very common indeed.

The film became perhaps the best-known example of neo-realism, a movement that wished to explore and give dignity to everyday lives, without pressing them into narrative demand. Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini reckoned, “The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realised that the necessity of the ‘story’ was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts.” (‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’) How to make images do more than serve the story? Politically, this would be by making sure the tale dealt with social deprivation. This is honourable. But not quite aesthetic. It wouldn’t quite pass in using the medium of film for an exploration of daily life. It would risk turning it into a propaganda tool. De Sica and Zavattini insist on the balance between detailing the quotidian, without reducing the film to a documentary of the poor in Rome. They do so by adding a story that the viewer engages with on the level of empathy rather than pity. If De Sica and Zavattini had chosen pity, they could have shown us the poor Italy they do show us, but the film wouldn’t have been driven by the characters’ specific anxiety. It would have been a general despair. While Ricci and his family are generally without means, they are specifically without a bicycle, and the film shows us the ongoing search, while containing within that search many others whose situation isn’t much better. By combining the quest for the bike with the milieu in which it has gone missing, De Sica successfully registers the importance of narrative for Ricci, as he determines to find the missing bicycle while, at the same time, showing the destitution we see. This isn’t something he would be noticing; what Ricci would see are others competing for resources, as we notice at the beginning of the film, when Ricci gets the job over numerous fellow unemployed. In the scene where Ricci believes he has spotted the thief and chases after him, for us to be aware only of the poverty would be to miss the point. But to focus exclusively on the chase would be to ignore the importance of the mise en scene that helped define a movement. One watches the film as a time capsule of its moment, an immediate post-war world where Italy’s Fascist government has lost the war and a new form of governance must be created that won’t allow another descent into Fascism. We see it in the new housing that is going up, but it would take more than a decade for Italy to become prosperous, and this is centrally, sociologically, the difference between De Sica’s film, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse. But out of this difference come many others, including a very different approach to narrative.

While we have noticed that in Bicycle Thieves the milieu becomes more pronounced than we would usually expect from a Hollywood film. No matter the marvellous use of the United Nations building in North by Northwest, and the use of LA as a city ripe for corruption in Chinatown, when water can be exploited in what amounts to a desert, the story is strong. In The Eclipse, the story so recedes that we are left with the specifics of the environment Antonioni films. If Gardner insisted that most good stories have someone coming or someone leaving, and Robert McKee believed that stories are best when characters are pushed to extremes, we could say The Eclipse doesn’t have much of a story. Nevertheless, the central character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is in crisis. She leaves her boyfriend at the beginning of the film and takes up with a stock trader, but neither appear to feel that much for each other, and in the well-known closing scene, we have a series of shots where we might expect to see them, but where both fail to turn up. This captures several things. The casual luxury of a life that means people needn’t make strong commitments, the difficulty in making decisions when one’s crisis is personal rather than, say, financial, political/and or villainously induced, and a filmmaker’s ability to take a crisis that might seem like a non-event to Thornhill, Gittes and Ricci, and turn it into a fresh aesthetic experience.

One could argue that filmmakers often make it easy on themselves by making the crisis categorical. Rather than McKee’s claim that extreme situations reveal character, they more readily reveal screenwriting mechanics. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it is a thing, and when given a choice between saving the house from falling off a cliff or buying a pint of milk from the shop, the character is hardly going to spend much time thinking about what ought to be the priority. To save your kidnapped daughter, to avert a nuclear crisis, to try and rescue a towering inferno, tends to concentrate the mind. But it isn’t likely to reveal personality as choice.  Such films don’t quite allow for character studies.

Often to earn such a moniker, a film will have characters facing difficult decisions but rarely monumental ones, and often choices that can seem on a par with others available. In Shoot the Moon, is Albert’s Finney’s writer finally any happier with his new lover than his former wife? Is his former wife, played by Diane Keaton, more content with her new man than her destructive and selfish, but still loved husband, and the father of their four children? Though the husband is a reckless and self-absorbed presence, he isn’t the ex from hell who must be killed in the denouement, even if some viewers, exasperated by his behaviour, might wish he would meet a suitable demise. (He is beaten up and humiliated.) But in Alan Parker’s best film, Parker hasn’t made a work about a dangerous man, but a foolish one, and the movie concerns itself with choices that could easily not have been made but were, and the consequences to all concerned. Yet next to The Eclipse, Shoot the Moon looks like a melodrama, as though Antonioni wanted to see what would happen when choices carry no urgency, and all of them seem equally futile. How can one build a narrative around this? The answer is, to some degree, you can’t, just as at the opposite extreme (kidnapped daughter; towering infernos) it is hard not to do so. While the scene at the beginning captures very well Vittoria’s indecisiveness as she prepares to leave her boyfriend, as she fiddles around with objects and moves through space as if somebody else ought to be able to move it just as well, by the end of the film, she doesn’t turn up for the rendezvous we invoked, and neither does her new boyfriend Riccardo (Alain Delon). If Antonioni, more than most, introduced an undecidable body language that could leave characters stranded in their own decision-making, he pushes things further in the closing scene of The Eclipse by showing that this inability to act has destroyed the film’s very conclusion.

We might not be surprised by their decision, but we will be surprised by Antonioni’s: to film the locations without them, as if to say that he isn’t only willing to make a work without a story, but is willing to conclude without characters as well. There are people in these series of shots, as we see a person reading a newspaper as he gets off the bus, others waiting to get on public transport, and kids playing on the street. But the emphasis rests on the emptiness, because we have become used to such people becoming no more than background filler as we focus on central characters. When those characters become peripheral, or there are too many of them (as we sometimes notice, for example, in Robert Altman’s films like Nashville and A Wedding), it can become disorienting, if not quite disconcerting. In the disorienting we can reorientate, and this is central to Altman’s aesthetic.  In The Eclipse, it disconcerts because no amount of orienting can lead us back to the story. Antonioni has obliterated it, and instigated a new form. It leaves us with a question. If the absence of story can generate original forms, does storytelling demand obvious visual formulations? That seems a claim too far, and one reason why we have looked at the UN scene in North by Northwest is that it combines fine storytelling with great visual astuteness. Hitchcock may have been a story director, but he usually wanted to keep his images fresh, even startling. Yet he also knew he was contained (rather than constrained) by storytelling. Antonioni more than most accepted the medium of film as one that usually tells a story, but always took this claim with scepticism. He used this doubt to produce images that weren’t beholden to the tale, but to expand the medium’s possibilities.


© Tony McKibbin