1st Edition
Introduction to Screen Narrative Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension
Bringing together the expertise of world-leading screenwriters and scholars, this book offers a comprehensive overview of how screen narratives work. Exploring a variety of mediums including feature films, television, animation, and video games, the volume provides a contextual overview of the form and applies this to the practice of screenwriting.
Featuring over 20 contributions, the volume surveys the art of screen narrative, and allows students and screenwriters to draw on crucial insights to further improve their screenwriting craft. Editors Paul Taberham and Catalina Iricinschi have curated a volume that spans a range of disciplines including screenwriting, film theory, philosophy and psychology with experience and expertise in storytelling, modern blockbusters, puzzle films and art cinema. Screenwriters interviewed include: Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons, Gravity Falls), David Greenberg (Stomping Ground, Used to Love Her), Evan Skolnick and Ioana Uricaru.
Ideal for students of Screenwriting and Screen Narrative as well as aspiring screenwriters wanting to provide theoretical context to their craft.
Introduction
Catalina Iricinschi and Paul Taberham
1. Dimensions of Narrative
Paul Taberham
PART I: Convention, Deviation, Evolution
2. Enjoying Classical Hollywood Storytelling
Todd Berliner
3. Independent Cinema
Geoff King
4. Interview: David Greenberg
5. Complex Film Narratives: Diegetic Fictionalization in Christopher Nolan’s Fantastical Puzzle Film Cycle
Miklós Kiss
PART II: Art Cinema
6. Realism, Time and Ambiguity: Narration in Art Cinema
Paul Taberham
7. Interview: Ioana Uricaru
8. Pseudo-Narration in Jean-Luc Godard’s Late Films
András Kovács
9. Defining a Lynchian Narrative
Neil McCartney
PART III: Alternative Media
10. Television Narrative: Forms, Strategies, and Histories
Sean O’Sullivan and Robyn Warhol
11. The Way Toons Tell It: Animation’s Narrative Strategies
Christopher Holliday
12. Interview: Josh Weinstein
13. Video Game Narrative: Concepts and Practices for Structuring and Infusing Story in Games
Dominic Arsenault
14. Interview: Evan Skolnick
15. Transmedia Storyworlds and Transmedia Universes
Jan-Noël Thon
PART IV: New Perspectives
16. Two Philosophies of the Screenplay
Enrico Terrone
17. The Absorbed Viewer’s Activity
Ed Tan and Katalin Bálint
18. The Cognition of Event Segmentation in Film Narrative: Segmenting, Parsing, and the Ensuing Narrative Comprehension
Catalina Iricinschi
Biography
Paul Taberham is Associate Professor in Film and Animation Studies at the Arts University Bournemouth, UK. He is the author of Lessons in Perception: The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist (Berghahn, 2018) and the forthcoming Animated Visions: Theory, History and Aesthetics (Berghahn, 2024). He is also the co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (Routledge, 2014) with Ted Nannicelli, and Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital (Routledge, 2019) with Miriam Harris and Lilly Husbands. Paul is a fellow of the Society of Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and on the editorial board for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Catalina Iricinschi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. Research interests include event segmentation in film narrative, eye tracking in narrative processing, narrative of belonging and displacement, place and space depiction in film narrative, and Romanian cinema. She has published in journals such as Cognitive Science, Projections: The Journal for Movie and Mind, I-Perception, along with the edited anthologies Space in Language and the forthcoming Narrative, Media and Cognition.
