Strategies for Partitioning Narratives

Abstract

The Hollywood narrative film is often viewed as an overall causal relationship driven by the protagonist’s pursuits. Contrary to this point of view, this study treats the Hollywood narrative film as a complex of primary and secondary causal relationships dominated by protagonists and supporting roles, respectively, and proposes to use the protagonist-led causal relationship to segment the Hollywood narrative film. The paper also advocates the use of visual, verbal, and aural performance cues to demarcate primary and secondary narrative units. The narrative units obtained through this segmentation method can be used to study Hollywood narrative film development, characters, and the relation between narrative and performance. This paper selects four Hollywood films ( Roman Holiday, Interstellar, Joker, and Lolita) representing different narrative paths to test the segmentation method. The validation process shows that the proposed method can effectively segment linear and non-linear Hollywood narrative films and distinguish narrative units. However, this study only applies the proposed segmentation method to limited Hollywood narrative films. Larger-scale validations are required in the future to test the effectiveness of the method and further refine it.