Last updated: May 6, 2003 Narrative Psychology Search	Film, Media, and Narrative    Film: Printed & Net Resources Suggested Films Feature Films Nonfiction/Documentary Films

Film and Media: Printed and Net Resources

The resources listed below offer a general scholarly overview of the domain of film criticism with reference to issues of moment to narrative psychology. The works of Bordwell (1985; 1989) and Branigan (1984; 1992) are particularly relevant. The introduction to film criticism of Bywater & Sobchack (1989) has been very well received and can provide the necessary background to Konigsberg's (1994) review of film theories.

Students of narrative psychology may be interested in descriptions of the early film industry as camera and editing techniques were originally constructed and the problems of continuity and interconnecting narrative subthemes within a film's plot were first mastered. The questions of how audiences (a) learn to see a film using a visually-mediated vocabulary and (b) relearn how to view a film with changing editing and presentation techniques relates directly to narrative issues of the social construction of meaning.

The Media and Communication Studies Site
Daniel Chandler
Department of Theater, Film, & Television Studies
University of Wales, Aberystwyth

An encyclopedic gathering of resources involving Active Interpretation, Advertising, Film Studies, Gender, Ethnicity, General Issues, General Reference, IT & Telecoms, Media Education, Media Influence, News Media, Pop Music/Youth,Textual Analysis, TV & Radio,Visual Image, the Written & Spoken Word.

• Semiotics for Beginners (Daniel Chandler)

Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research
Alan Liu, Department of English
UC Santa Barbara

• Media Theory and History: Resources

Narrative and the Media (Medwyn Jones, North East Wales Institute)

Internet Movie Database

• Basic information about every film made.

Media Ecology Assocation

Aumont, J. (1989, August). The point of view. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11, 1-22.

Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the fiction film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. [PN1995 .P6173 1985]

Bordwell, D. (1988, Spring). ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the morphology of film narrative. Cinema Journal, 27, 5-20.

Bordwell, D. (1989). Making meaning: Inference and rhetoric in the interpretation of cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [PN1995 .B6172 1989]

Bordwell, D. (1998). On the history of film style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2000). Film art: An introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Branigan, E. (1984). Point of view in the cinema: A theory of narration and subjectivity in classical film. New York: Mouton.

Branigan, E. (1992). Narrative comprehension and film. New York: Routledge [PN1995.3.B73 1992]

Bywater, T., & Sobchack, T. (1989). An introduction to film criticism: Major critical approaches to narrative film. New York: Longman. [PN1995 .B9 1989]

Cameron, I. (Ed.). (1992). The book of film noir. New York: Continuum [PN1995.9.F54 B66 1993]

Chatman, S. B. (1980). Story and discourse: Narrative structure in fiction and film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• Classic study of structuralist narrative analysis.

Chatman, S. B. (1990). Coming to terms: The rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [PN212 .C47 1990]

Cook, D. A. (1990). A history of narrative film (2nd ed.). New York: Norton. [PN1993.5.A1 C65 1990] ( for first edition, 1980, only)

Gunning, T. (1991). D. W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film: The early years at Biograph. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. [PN1998.3.G76 G8 1991]

Guynn, W. H. (1990). A cinema of nonfiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. [PN1995.9.D6 G89 1990]

Kinder, M. (1991, December). The Spanish oedipal narrative from Raza to Bilbao. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 13, 67-94.

Konigsberg, I. (1994). Film theory. In M. Groden & M. Kreiswirth (Eds.), The Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory and criticism (pp. 268-273). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. [REF PN81.J554 1994]

Man, G. (1993, Fall). Gender, genre, and myth in Thelma and Louise. Film Criticism, 18, 36-53.

Monaco, J. (2000). How to read a film: The world of movies, media, and multimedia: Language, history, theory (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Neale, S. (1991, Spring). Aspects of ideology and narrative form in the American war film. Screen (London, England), 32, 35-57.

Nichols, B. (1987, Fall). History, myth, and narrative in documentary. Film Quarterly, 41, 9-20.

Odin, R. (1994). Narrative comprehended [review of the book Narrative comprehension and film]. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 15(3), 35-46.

Palmer, J., & Riley, M. (1995). Seeing, believing, and "knowing" in narrative film: Don't Look Now revisited. Literature/Film Quarterly, 23(1), 14-25.

Perez, G. (1991, November 4). In the beginning [reviews of the books Babel and Babylon; Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company; D. W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film, and others]. Nation, 253, 557-560.

Prince, G. (1992, Fall). Reviewing narratology [review of the book Coming to terms: The rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film'. Comparative Literature, 44, 409-414.

Rush, J. S. (1990, May). Who's in on the joke: Parody as hybridized narrative discourse. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 12, 5-12.

Sharrett, C. (Ed.). (1993). Crisis cinema: The apocalyptic idea in postmodern narrative film. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press.

Telotte, J. P. (1989). Voices in the dark: The narrative patterns of film noir. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. [PN1995.9.F54 T44 1989]

Turim, M. (1989). Flashbacks in film: Memory and history. New York: Routledge. [PN1995.9.F56T87 1989]

Turner, G. (1986). National fictions: Literature, film, and the construction of Australian narrative. Boston: Allen & Unwin. [PR9612.6.N37 T87 1986]

Turner, G. (1993). The genres are American: Australian narrative, Australian film, and the problem of genre. Literature/Film Quarterly, 21(2), 102-111.

Suggested Films

---

Note About Feature and Nonfiction/Documentary Film Suggestions

The films listed below were chosen because they offer a representative sample of very good-to-excellent works illustrating many issues raised by the narrative viewpoint and examined among the printed research materials listed above. A subset of these films might serve to structure a thematic treatment of important topics; possible questions include:

• consistency in personality over the life-span
• emergence of unheard voices/unseen groups (gays, African-Americans, poor people)
• evil and human identity (the Holocaust; racism and prejudice)
• fiction and non-fiction: narrative differences and similarities
• journey as a grounding for identity
• language, discourse and the origins of human meaning
• modernism versus postmodernism in art and narrative
• multiplicity versus unity in individual selves
• social and/or historical forces as they shape the development of individual selves
• the role of memory in development of personal identity
• the search for meaning in the texture and events of daily life
• viewpoint as determinative of meaning

+28 UP
35 UP
+Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (PBS/1984)
Bill Moyers: Circle of Recovery
Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, The
Brother's Keeper (1993)
Children of the Night (PBS)
+Civil War, The (PBS)
+Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Discovering Women (PBS Series Parts 1-6)
Epic That Never Was, The (1965)
Harlan County U.S.A.
Hearts and Minds (1974)
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
+Hoop Dreams
Incident at Oglala (1992)
+Let There Be Light
Making of A Doctor, The (PBS continuing series)
Marjoe (1972)
Real World I, II, or III
+Thin Blue Line, The (1988)
Times of Harvey Milk, The