Velvet Light Trap articles from September 2006

Velvet Light Trap archives from September 2006

Introduction.(movie, television narratives)(Editorial)
September 22, 2006... The assumption that there are a limited number of stories to be told has endured from Carlo Gozzi's schematic of thirty-six possible plots in 1916 (Polti) to Christopher Booker's taxonomy of seven in 2005. Yet the categorization of plots that...

Emotional curves and linear narratives.
September 22, 2006... In Fred Niblo's 1921 version of The Three Musketeers D'Artagnan, played by Douglas Fairbanks, first joins forces with the title characters during an extended fight scene. The scene is packed with gags and stunts as Fairbanks leaps around the...

From beats to arcs: toward a poetics of television narrative.
September 22, 2006... Television is a story machine. Every day, thousands of hours of narrative zip through the airwaves and cables and into our sets and minds. Television does more than just tell stories, of course, but its function as a storytelling medium demands...

Narrative complexity in contemporary American television.
September 22, 2006... A longside the host of procedural crime dramas, domestic sitcoms, and reality competitions that populate the American television schedule, a new form of entertainment television has emerged over the past two decades to both critical and popular...

Narration in the cinema of digital sound.
September 22, 2006... No one would deny that technological change can have a major impact on cinematic stortelling. Historically, the definitive example of this would be the development of synchronized sound--filmmakers who had previously been forced to rely solely...

Narrative structure in The Sixth Sense: a new twist in "twist movies"?
September 22, 2006... A part from the acting of young Haley Joel Osment, which won universal praise, The Sixth Sense met with mixed reviews. Stephen Holden of the New York Times called it "gaggingly mawkish supernatural kitsch," while Desson Howe of the Washington...

Contingency, order, and the modular narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible.
September 22, 2006... A number of contemporary "modular narrative" films display, as a central stylistic and thematic concern, a fraught relationship between contingency and narrative order. This tendency finds particularly strong expression in two recent examples:...

On Location: Canada's Television Industry in a Global Market by Serra Tinic.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... To read many popular accounts of globalization, it might be easy to conclude, as far as the media are concerned, that the institution of the nation-state has become obsolete. For good or ill, converging digital technologies have made it easier...

Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade by Vicki Callahan.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... An English-language book-length work on Louis Feuillade's films has been long overdue. Although the director's work has undergone a sort of renaissance of appreciation marked by a proliferation of articles and festivals, Vicki Callahan's Zones...