Alternative Scriptwriting, 6th Edition

25 Dramatic Voice/Narrative Voice

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242307-25

Film theorist and historian David Bordwell notes that mainstream film subordinates everything to narrative causality and character motivation. “In Hollywood cinema, a specific sort of narrative causality operates as the dominant, making temporal and spatial systems vehicles for it.”¹ These subordinated temporal and spatial systems—the actual elements of film language—are rendered transparent by the functioning of a conventional structure that creates the illusion that the story would happen exactly the same way regardless of whether the camera was there. Most of our dramatic concerns—the plausibility of motivation, the consistency of character, the avoidance of overt coincidence, ...