telling is a complicated business, especially when
one is relating a multifaceted story involving multi-
ple characters and conflicts over the course of two
hours of screen time. Besides being a general term
for a story or for a kind of movie, narrativeis often
used to describe the way that movie stories are con-
structed and presented in order to engage, involve,
and orient an audience. This narrative structure—
which includes exposition, rising action, climax,
falling action, and denouement—helps filmmakers
manipulate the viewer’s cinematic experience by
selectively conforming to or diverging from audi-
ence expectations of storytelling. Chapter 4 is
devoted to this aspect of narrative.
Narrative is a broader concept that both includes
and goes beyond any of these applications.Narrative
can be defined in a broader conceptual context as
any cinematic structure in which content is selected
and arranged in a cause-and-effect sequence of
events occurring over time. Any time a filmmaker
consciously chooses and organizes material so that
one event leads to another in a recognizable pro-
gression, that filmmaker is employing narrative in
its most basic sense. In this case, narrative is not
simply the telling of a fictional story, it is a struc-
tural quality that nearly every movie possesses,
whether it’s an avant-garde art film, a documentary
account of actual events, or a blockbuster Holly-
wood fantasy.
Movies do not have to arrange events in conven-
tional order to employ narrative organization. In 21
Grams(2003), director Alejandro González Iñárritu
and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga arrange the
events comprising the intersecting stories of ex-
convict Jack (Benicio Del Toro), dying heart patient
Paul (Sean Penn), and recovering cocaine addict
Cristina (Naomi Watts) in a sequence motivated
more by causality than chronology. A sequence in
which Paul receives a heart transplant and Cristina
loses her family propels the movie into a scene in
which Paul approaches Cristina after he tracks her
down as the person who saved his life by donating
her recently deceased husband’s heart. This per-
sonal connection is followed by the moments imme-
diately preceding the death of Cristina’s husband,
the tragedy that will ultimately bring these two lost
souls together. The next scene presents a devastated
Jack resolving to turn himself in after leaving the
scene of an accident that killed a man and his two
daughters, knowing full well that his confession
could send him back to prison. These events occur
over time but are not connected by it. The scene-to-
scene causality in this case is not motivated by
chronology, but from the remorse, vulnerability, and
sacrifice that bind the central characters. This
particular approach to narrative demands a greater
level of participation from viewers, who must actively
engage the movie to recognize the connections pre-
sented and reassemble events into a chronology that
will allow them to fully comprehend the story.
Although nonfiction filmmakers shooting docu-
mentary footage obviously can’t always control the
unstaged events happening before their cameras,
contemporary documentary filmmakers often
exploit their ability to select and arrange material in
a cause-and-effect sequence of events. This very
deliberate process may begin even before cameras
roll. Murderball(2005) directors Henry Alex Rubin
and Dana Adam Shapiro surely recognized the nar-
rative potential of an international competition
when they chose the months leading to the Para-
lympic Games in Athens, Greece, to chronicle a
team of paraplegic wheelchair rugby players.
Although the movie documents the off-court strug-
gles of a variety of subjects, the film’s events are
very deliberately structured around the intense
rivalry between Team USA star player Mark Zupan
and Joe Soares, former Team USA member and
now captain of Canada’s team. Like a fictional
sports film, Murderballreaches its climax in a sus-
penseful showdown between the two rival teams.
The nonfiction filmmaker’s selective role is even
more apparent in the Academy Award–winning
documentary Born into Brothels(2004; directors:
Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman). The film’s events
are structured around codirector Briski’s explicitly
stated intent to use photography to reach and ulti-
mately rescue the children of prostitutes in Cal-
cutta’s red-light district. The film’s events are
arranged in a cause-and-effect structure strikingly
similar to that of a conventional fiction movie, with
the filmmakers themselves not only selecting and
arranging events, but actively participating in them.
Briski engages the children first by photographingTHE IDEA OF NARRATIVE 67