Introduction to Screen Narrative

Combining the expertise of screenwriters and scholars, this book offers a comprehensive overview of how screen narratives work. Exploring feature films, television, animation, and video games, the volume provides a contextual overview of the form and applies this to the practice of screenwriting.

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

Introduction
Catalina Iricinschi and Paul Taberham1. Dimensions of Narrative
Paul Taberham**PART I: Convention, Deviation, Evolution*2. Enjoying Classical Hollywood Storytelling
Todd Berliner3. 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
   PaulTaberham*7. Interview: Ioana Uricaru
6. 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 Warhol11. The Way Toons Tell It: Animation's Narrative Strategies
   Christopher Holliday*12. Interview: Josh Weinstein
7. Video Game Narrative: Concepts and Practices for Structuring and Infusing Story in Games
   Dominic Arsenault14. Interview: Evan Skolnick
8. Transmedia Storyworlds and Transmedia Universes
   Jan-Noël Thon**PART IV: New Perspectives*16. Two Philosophies of the Screenplay
   Enrico Terrone17. The Absorbed Viewer's Activity
   Ed Tan and Katalin Bálint18. The Cognition of Event Segmentation in Film Narrative: Segmenting, Parsing, and the Ensuing Narrative Comprehension
   CatalinaIricinschi*