The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film‪.‬

When faced with a task as daunting as explaining how viewers make sense of narrative film, one would do well to narrow the field a bit, to group films together in order to make the project a bit more manageable. The task then becomes finding the appropriate criteria for making distinctions between one group of films and another. The most persistent and widely used classification systems in cinema, both inside and outside the academy, are genre and author. (1) In the rhetoric of critics, advertisers, and moviegoers alike, genre and author labels provide a short-hand for the experience of watching a film. While genre theory concentrates on formal elements (either iconographic or syntagmatic) and auteur theory derives its categories from these elements as well as the production history, a narratological perspective takes the selection and arrangement of story material to be the defining characteristic of a class of film. How a story is told is more important than what the story is about. In his 1985 book, Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell sets forth a poetics of narration. Appropriating the theories and language of Russian Formalists, Bordwell identifies variability in the selection and arrangement of story material across cinema history. Certain historical periods in this history have yielded films that possess similar narrative principles. The texts produced during these eras have textual elements and structures that prompt certain sense-making activities on the part of the viewer. Bordwell provides examples of these "modes of narration" in this book, outlining the narration in classical Hollywood cinema, art cinema, Soviet cinema, and Modernist cinema (Bordwell 1985).