Structure

Structure is the order and proportion of a story's parts: where it starts, where it turns, what it plants early and pays off late, how it ends. It is a contract with the audience. They feel its terms without naming them, which is why a broken contract lands harder than a broken rule. The common error is to treat structure as a template (three acts, a midpoint, a climax at the three-quarter mark) and grade films on compliance. The template is real. But it describes the writer's side of the contract; the audience's side, the pattern of expectation and payoff, is the one you can analyse from your seat.

Pattern, paradigm, graph

Film Art starts from the audience. Form is a pattern the artist designs "so that we can have a structured experience" (fa 51), and the pattern works by creating expectations and sustaining them over time; once inside it, we want it to develop and conclude (fa 54). Structure here is the experience of waiting for the next part.

Giannetti (Understanding Movies) describes the writer's template. The classical paradigm is Freytag's inverted V: an opening conflict, rising action, a climax where "the protagonist and antagonist clash overtly. One wins, the other loses", then a resolution and formal closure (um 338). He sets out Syd Field's three acts and the eight-sequence variant, and then adds the caveat that matters: applied mechanically, the model "is merely a formula" (um 342). Film Art reports the same rule from outside: first-act climax at a quarter, second at three-quarters (fa 584).

Bruce Block (The Visual Story) turns the paradigm into a graph. A story begins at zero intensity, climbs through the conflict to a hundred at the climax and drops to zero in the resolution (vs 251), and the picture's visual structure, its contrast of line, colour and rhythm, should track that line (vs 246). Bordwell says structure is something the audience undergoes; Giannetti says it is a shape the writer builds, and warns against building it by rote; Block says it is a curve you can draw and then light and cut to. The disagreement is over who owns it.

On the bench

Psycho signs the classical contract in full and then tears it up. Marion has a goal, a flaw and a moral turn, built by the book, and at the midpoint of act two the film murders her (Killing the protagonist at minute 47). The shock is only partly the violence; it is the narration breaking its own pattern, Bordwell's account of structure demonstrated by violation. A film shaped like that cannot survive a latecomer (Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy).

Alice — the prologue is structure as promise. Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, then a cut that jumps 27 years, so that everything after is an audit of the dream the opening staged. Taxi Driver is structured as a diary, dated by its own voice-over, and its organising image was the first shot Scorsese thought of and the last he filmed (Taxi Driver — the phone call). The Craft has two halves that want different things, and the join is visible (The Craft turns on its own coven). Draw Block's curve for it and you will need two lines.

After Hours (1985) is one night built as a chain, each rescue turning into the next trap, and its ending closes a circle: the film starts at Paul's terminal and ends there (After Hours — back at work). It is also a lesson in how endings get chosen. The film had four (Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway; Michael Powell wrote the ending), and the one that survived was the one that obeyed the rules the other ninety minutes had set.

What to look for

• Where are the irreversible turns, and do they fall where the template says? If not, what does the displacement do?
• What did the first two minutes promise, and does the ending answer that promise or a different one?
• What is planted early and collected late? What is planted and never collected?
• Draw the intensity curve. Does the film's lighting, cutting and colour follow it, or work against it?

In the books

Artists design their works—they give them form—so that we can have a structured experience. For this reason, form is of central importance in film.

— Film Art, fa 51

Here, the protagonist and antagonist clash overtly. One wins, the other loses. After their confrontation, the dramatic intensity subsides in the resolution.

— Giannetti, um 338

Picture makers must understand story structure or they may never be able to correctly use visual structure.

— Block, vs 246