modus’s guards—creates subordinate events. Her
love surfaces at key moments, troubling and tempt-
ing Maximus; but because other things are more
important to him, he is not forced to make a deci-
sion based on his feelings for her. These minor or
subordinate events enrich and complicate the die-
gesis (the world of the story) in a narrative film, but
no single such event is indispensable to the story.
When filmmakers make decisions about which
scenes to cut from a film during the editing phase,
they generally look for minor events that, for one
reason or another, don’t contribute enough to the
overall movie. As a critical viewer of movies, you
can use this hierarchy of events in diagramming a
plot (as a practical way of understanding it) or
charting a course of the major and minor events
confronting the characters.
Duration
Events, in life and in the movies, take time to occur.
Durationis this length of time. When talking about
narrative movies specifically, we can identify three
specific kinds of duration: story durationis the
amount of time that the implied story takes to
occur; plot durationis the elapsed time of those
events within the story that the film explicitly pres-
ents (in other words, the elapsed time of the plot);
and screen durationis the movie’s running time
on-screen. In Citizen Kane, the plot duration is
approximately one week (the duration of Thomp-
son’s search), the story duration is more than sev-
enty years (the span of Kane’s life), and the screen
duration is 1 hour 59 minutes, the time it takes us to
watch the film from beginning to end without inter-
ruption.
These distinctions are relatively simple in Citi-
zen Kane, but the three-part relation of story, plot,
and screen duration can become quite complex in
some movies. Balancing the three elements is espe-
cially complex for a filmmaker because the screen
duration is necessarily constrained by financial and
other considerations. Movies may have become
longer on average over the years, but filmmakers
still must present their stories within a relatively
short span of time. Because moviegoers generally
regard films that run more than three hours as too
long, such movies risk failure at the box office. Fig-
ure 4.3 illustrates the relationship between story
duration and plot duration in a hypothetical movie.
The story duration in this illustration—one week—
is depicted in a plot that covers four discrete but
crucial days in that week.
The relationships among the three types of
duration can be isolated and analyzed, not only in
the context of the entire narrative of the film, but
also within its constituent parts—in scenes and
sequences. In these smaller parts, however, the
relationship between plot duration and story dura-
tion generally remains stable; that is, in most main-
stream Hollywood movies, the duration of a plot
event is assumed to be equivalent to the duration of
the story event that it implies. At the level of scenes
(a sequence of related shots), the more interesting
relationship is usually between screen duration and12Hierarchy of events in GladiatorIn Ridley Scott’s
Gladiator(2000), the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(Richard Harris) [1] instantly transforms the fortunes of
General Maximus (Russell Crowe) for the worse, setting the
plot in motion. Lucilla’s (Connie Nielsen) love for Maximus [2]
informs the plot through a series of subordinate
circumstances, which produce a crucial event near the end.
ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE 149