Fig. 1

The correspondence between the aggregated viewer responses (proportional agreement that a narrative boundary has occurred) and theoretical considerations in segmenting three early films. The thin blue spikes are the viewers’ data; the thicker red spikes in the left and middle panels derive from Thompson (1999), and the thicker green spikes derive from descriptions by her and by Bordwell (2006). The width of the base of the spikes is due to two factors. The left flank represents the duration of the last scene before the transition, and the right flank the duration of the scene following it. The right panel also has a series of numbers that represent the beginnings and ends of the nested flashbacks