Conjectures on how pace has converged on narrative form
As a recap, let me proceed through the sequential narrative structure of movies and outline the changes in film style, when they occurred. I will also suggest possible psychological reasons for them and give examples from particular movies from this sample along the way.
The prologue and the setup. Some more recent movies have a “cold open” where the movie launches directly into what appears to be the middle of the narrative (Die Hard 2, 1990; Erin Brockovich, 2000; The Social Network, 2010). However, the typical movie of the last 70 years opens with a prologue. Shots are relatively long in duration; they are wide shots (people fill relatively little of the screen); they are occasionally coupled with dissolves rather than cuts; they may jump across time and place; they are covered with nondiegetic (background) music; they typically show few conversations; and they are often covered with title credits (Cutting, 2016). The latter might seem to account for much of this structure, but all of these features except being covered with title credits (which began in this sample in 1960) existed in the early live action shots of movies in the two decades before, when opening credits were title cards (printed lettering, typically in black on white).
In the silent era, and even into the 1930s and 1940s (A Tale of Two Cities, 1935; Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935; Foreign Correspondent, 1940), introductory narrative information about time and place was typically carried by one or more expository intertitles. Thus, long-duration live action shots were not used. After these intertitles, shots also had little motion; however, over the last 60 years, the prologue has gradually become one of the most active sections of movies, but still with shots relatively long in duration. These often include pans and tracking shots of the initial settings of the narrative.
The purpose of the structure of prologue shots appears to be to bring the viewer down into the narrative. Often this is literally true; in The Hunt for Red October (1990), for example, we first hover over a digital globe that rotates, first showing the United States and then Russia, and then in live action we look down on snowcapped mountains near Murmansk. In MASH (1970), we first look down on a helicopter flying over the mountains of Korea (the stand-in for Vietnam) before then looking up as it lands. In East of Eden (1955), we look down on the Monterey, California, coastline. Such shots create an atmosphere and inform the viewer about the locations and time periods of the narrative. Background music also helps create calm, or anxiety, or whatever emotion is appropriate to the situation (Kalinak, 2010).
There then follows an almost seamless glide into the setup and the narrative proper. Shot durations shorten but not too rapidly, and motion diminishes, but in contemporary movies again not too fast. Background music, which set the emotional tone for the beginning of the film, typically drops out, and conversations begin, often with the protagonist involved – at least 80% of all prologues introduce the protagonist (Cutting, 2016). The exogenous demands for eye movements will increase as the shot-reverse shot technique (alternately showing the characters conversing) takes over. The modal pace of the movie becomes established – the average shot duration during a conversation is typically about the average shot duration of the movies – as we learn about the goals of the characters and their circumstances. Near the end of the setup, an inciting incident often derails these goals, and a new plan of action needs to be formulated.
Complication and Development. Neither shot duration nor motion has any distinctive patterns in the complication and development sections. To be sure, individual movies will vary, but the normative pattern is for relative consistency across these sections, where 60% of the shots continue to show conversations, slightly more for dramas, less for action movies. Nonetheless, changes have taken place in film style that affect these narrative sections. Mean shot duration rises from the silent era (about 7 seconds) to the early sound era (11 seconds), and then shortens markedly through the midsample movies (7 seconds) to the more contemporary films (4 seconds). The decreases in shot duration in this range affect exogenous eye movements and are likely to increase attentional demands on the viewer. The mean amount of motion also increases steadily from the silent era to the present, and this, too, is likely to affect eye movements and attention, particularly in our current era of intensified continuity (Bordwell, 2006).
The major signal of dynamic change in the complication and development is in lighting, measured as overall frame luminance. Each of the four movie eras investigated here show some evidence of a decline in luminance across these sections. The evidence was weak in the silent movies, weak and nondiscriminating for the early sound movies (the decline covers the setup and climax as well), and nascent for the midsample films, but it finally crystallized in the more contemporary films. The rationale for this darkening of cinematic images appears to be connected to the travails of the protagonist as she is thwarted in her plans to achieve her goal. Indeed, the term used for the end of the development is the darkest moment (Bordwell, 2006; Keating, 2011; Smith, 2015). Interestingly, until recently (Cutting, 2016), there was no evidence that this was literally true. This is a case where metaphor meets preexisting reality.
Climax and Epilogue. The most striking evolutionary patterns in movies have occurred in the climax and epilogue. Silent movies showed some suspicion of decreased shot durations and increased movement in the climax, followed by their reversal in the epilogue, but the early sound movies showed no trace of either. The pattern reappeared, somewhat malformed, in the midsample films and became very strong in the more contemporary movies.
Why might this pattern occur? The function of the climax is to bring the protagonist to a situation where she can directly achieve her goal. In action films, this is done by physical conflict (Spectre, 2015); in courtroom dramas, it is typically the lead-up to a jury’s or judge’s decision (Inherit the Wind, 1960); in romantic comedies, it is the reconciliation of a couple (Philadelphia Story, 1940); in adventure films, it is working through some territorial difficulties (Back to the Future, 1985); and in mysteries, it can be the discovery of the solution to a crime (Psycho, 1960). Shorter shot durations can increase the exogenous control of eye position and eye movements; more motion attracts attention; and it seems likely that the cross-cutting of short scenes of the protagonist and antagonist in action films creates anxiety. But the increase in luminance across the climax is a signal that things should turn out well.
Of course, such a heightened state is difficult to maintain, and few movies try. The function of the epilogue is to bring the story back to diegetic normality, to tie up loose ends, and then lift the viewer (often literally with a rising crane shot, as in Ordinary People, 1980; Mission: Impossible II, 2000; and Valentine’s Day, 2010) out of the narrative. Longer duration shots and decreased motion place fewer exogenous demands on eye movements and attention, and the continued brightening of the image declares that things will remain well.
Narrative transportation, pace, and the physical responses of viewers
Stories are the bedrock of culture. Whether by listening, reading, or viewing, we gather critically important information from stories. The phenomenon of our engagement with stories is called narrative transportation (Gerrig, 1993; see also Van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2014). This is exactly what Griffith (1926, p. 28) had in mind when he suggested that movies “lift [viewers] out of commonplace existence, and bear them … to realms of adventure and romance.”
Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) parsed narrative engagement into four features. The first is narrative understanding, without which there can be no thorough engagement. Another is narrative presence (the feeling of having entered the story, typically at the cost of paying attention to our real-life surrounds). In this context, I’ll take narrative understanding as granted and acknowledge that narrative presence may be the most interesting component of the four.
Presence, of course, has been a key term in the domain of virtual reality since its beginning (see, for example, Barfield, Sheridan, Zeltzer, & Slater, 1995), capturing the idea that the viewer is mentally present in, and has been transported to, a different environment. Thus, it should surprise no one that when watching movies one can have changes in heart rate (Barraza, Alexander, Beavin, Terris, & Zak, 2015), changes in blood pressure (Miller et al., 2006), changes in electrodermal activity (Tsai, Levenson, & Carstensen, 2000), changes in respiratory cycling (Child et al., 2014; Tsai et al., 2000), and, when appropriate, even have oxytocin (Barraza & Zak, 2009) and endorphin release (Dunbar et al., 2016). After all, watching movies is quite a bit like watching the life around us, but with, as Alfred Hitchcock put it, the “dull bits cut out” (Truffaut, 1983, p. 103). Likely much of this physiological responding is caused by the content of the narrative, but quite likely it is augmented in the manipulation by filmmakers of the variables investigated here – patterns of shot duration, motion, and luminance.
Two of the features of narrative transportation outlined by Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) fit snugly with this view – attentional focus (lack of mind-wandering) and emotional engagement (our feeling for the characters). The changes in cut frequency and motion likely contribute to the former and luminance to the latter. Do these patterns alone affect heart rate and the other physiological measures? Empirically, this would be challenging to determine, but with enough different movies appropriately measured and enough subjects, it should be possible to answer this query.
Film style: evolution or change?
Are these changes in patterns of shot duration, motion, and luminance across the sound era an example of an evolution or simply of change? Moreover, might the changes be simply an example of fashion, reflecting different time periods of moviemaking? Carbon (2010) noted that fashion typically follows cyclic patterns. To be sure, there is evidence of fashion in cinema. For example, the creation of dramatic long takes in some contemporary movies, particularly through the digital knitting together of separate shots, may recall a type of cinema more common to the mid-20th century. A case in point is the 6-minute-long opening “Day of the Dead” shot in Spectre (2015). Long takes aside, however, there is no evidence in the data presented here for a cyclic oscillation across time in measures of shot duration, motion, and luminance.
With respect to the biology, it is obvious that movies are not living entities that reproduce. Nonetheless, there is quite a lot of random variation in the movies of all eras along the dimensions investigated here. Griffith’s (1926) claims aside, I found no evidence in silent films (1915–1925) and early sound films (1930–1955) of any systematic correspondence between the structure of the fabula and the pace of the syuzhet.Footnote 9 Yet, in the more contemporary movies (1990–2015), those correspondences are strong.
A stable narrative structure can be construed as a potential niche. In the process of natural selection, a niche serves as a “habitat” for the evolution of a species’ morphological (and other) adaptations. If the “species” is the syuzhet and the “habitat” is the general, four-part narrative structure of the fabula, I would claim that the “natural selection” across a century of filmmaking (the “random” explorations of filmmakers and their assessments of successes and failures) has brought films and their syuzhet’s morphology slowly into a species/niche-like correspondence.
Make no mistake, there may be many more such correspondences beyond the three examples investigated here, and there also may be many dimensions of change in movies for which an evolutionary perspective is unhelpful. Nonetheless, here – in the domain of whole-film pace reflected in patterns of shot durations, motion, and luminance – an evolutionary view seems unexceptionable.
Why did these changes in pace take so long?
Whether one regards these results as a consequence of evolution or merely of a set of changes, one should ask: Why did it take 60 years and more – from 1915 or 1930 until 1990 and beyond – for the patterns shown in the right panels of Figs. 2, 3, and 4 to appear? In retrospect, these dynamic configurations of film style seem fairly obvious. Shouldn’t filmmakers have figured this out long ago? Continuing on the evolutionary theme, I note that cultural evolution, although sometimes quite rapid, need not be (Perrault, 2012). Three factors may have masked these changes from being obvious.
First, when editors work on movies, almost all of their efforts are on shots and scenes, not acts. Among other things, the editor’s task is to make shots carry the intended emotion, to meet the requirements of content, and to make scenes have appropriate shot durations and motion in order for pace to sensibly build up and step back (Griffith, 1926; Murch, 2001; Pearlman, 2009). Each movie has many scenes, and, if one counts cross-cut scenes separately, over the last 7 decades, there have been between 40 and several hundred separate scenes and subscenes of different durations in any given movie (Cutting et al., 2012). Editors mostly work locally, and the patterns discussed here are global to the whole film. I suspect that in a century of filmmaking practice, the local changes propagated locally, iteratively affecting nearby scenes, passing on their local constraints until a stable global pattern emerged. Such a process has been suggested in many domains of science, from vision (Saarinen, Levi, & Shen, 1997) to ecology (Pagnutti, Azzouz, & Anand, 2007).
Second, filmmaking is a craft. As a craft, its required skills are not easily penetrated in a conscious manner. The acquisition of skill is partly a trial-and-error process of exploring and developing technique, and the rules that govern the execution of the work are often more tacit than explicit (Polanyi, 1966). Collectively, editing also depends on cultural transmission, here across generations of the relatively closed society of filmmakers (Cutting & Candan, 2013,
2015). Or, more colorfully, as Walter Murch noted, “You pick up the good things that other editors are doing and you metabolize those approaches into what you are doing, and vice versa” (Ondaatje, 2002, p. 62).
Third, technology has almost certainly played a pivotal role. Cameras have gotten lighter and smaller, enhancing the use of close-ups and of motion (Bordwell, 2006). Film and now digital sensitivity have increased to make the bulky lighting equipment needed in earlier times less necessary; thus, shooting is more portable, quicker, and allows a wider range of locations. But perhaps most important are the effects of nonlinear (nondestructive) digital editing. This process, which began to be available in the late 1980s and early 1990s, can be much faster than the old cut-and-paste method for analog film, and it more easily allows for “errors” and changes. One can create and then see the results of one’s pacemaking in scenes and larger film units more readily and quickly.
Other cinemas, other paces
Finally, the purpose of this article has been to mark evolutionary changes in the development of movie-length differences in film style as manifest over a century of popular English-language movies. Two further questions arise. The first is, would these results generalize to the national films in other languages? The answer is unclear. It is not even entirely clear that four-part fabulas would prevail in other cinemas. Thus, the analysis of a sufficiently large sample of films from Europe, Asia, or elsewhere would provide interesting and possibly different results. On the other hand, the century-long dominance of Hollywood movies in the global market suggests that there may be similar structures and effects worldwide, and thus, in pursuing any narrative-film style (fabula-syuzhet) link, it seems reasonable to have begun with English-language films.
A second question is related: Are there other stable patterns of pacing that would be plausible and effective? In other words, could the evolutionary product have been different? It should be nearly tautological to say that a well-edited movie is well-paced, but it seems probable that the form of that film’s syuzhet might systematically diverge from the general patterns found here if narratives were also quite different. Psycho (1960), for example, can be divided in half as if it were two movies with mostly different characters (Smith, 2009). The shower scene seems a natural (and very early) climax, and the cleanup following that scene has something like the calmness of an epilogue. Both halves of the movie have similar shot duration profiles, and each is similar to those of the left panel of Fig. 1 for whole movies. In addition, the second half (but not the first) has a motion pattern like that of the middle panel of Fig. 1, and the first half (but not the second) has a luminance pattern like that of the right panel. Thus, it might be possible for these results to be parts of a stable pattern if most films parsed themselves into episodic halves like Psycho.