Structure
The architecture of the telling: acts, setups, payoffs, and the contract a shape makes with its audience.
- story conventions
- reference
- story-convention
How a narrative is built: acts and turning points, setup and payoff, repetition and rhyme, openings that promise and endings that answer. Structure is a contract — audiences feel its terms even when they can't name them, which is why breaking it lands so hard.
What to look for
Where are the irreversible turns? What did the opening promise, and does the ending answer that promise or a different one? What is rhymed?
Canonical cases
Killing the protagonist at minute 47 — Psycho signing the classical contract in act one precisely so it can tear it up. Alice — the prologue as structural promise: a childhood dream staged as pure Hollywood, so the whole film after it becomes the audit of that dream.
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art on narrative form; Durgnat tracking Psycho's two-film shape.