Over and over in the study of cinema the issue of narrative arises not simply because it has been the historically dominant mode of cinematic production, but because it is above all a tool for contextualizing, a logic for delimiting meaning. […] In the representational cinema it can be flaunted, observed, or ridiculed, but narrative can never be absent. (Dudley Andrew 1984, 76)

Dudley Andrew identifies two fundamental reasons film theorists study narrative: narrative cinema is the historically dominant mode of filmmaking, and narrative is a pervasive logic that delimits or organizes meaning. These two reasons are, of course, linked, for narrative cinema is dominant because it is a pervasive logic that organizes meaning. Andrew also notes the ways this dominant logic can and has been manipulated — flaunted and ridiculed — within representational cinema. Edward Branigan has similarly theorized the concept of narrative as a ubiquitous form of logic that “organizes data into a special pattern which represents and explains experience” (1992, 3; emphasis omitted). Yet, despite narrative's omnipresence, it is absent in extreme forms of nonrepresentational cinema. In the 1970s, modernist avant- garde filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal developed a polemical critique of representational cinema because its narrative and processes of identification passively project viewers into an illusionistic fictional world. In his essays and films, Gidal promoted structural/ materialist filmmaking, a radically nonnarrative, nonillusionistic, nonrepresentational, impersonal and reflexive practice that aims to destroy cinema's illusions and present nothing more than film's form, materiality and process on screen (Gidal 1989).

Rather than examine these extreme nonrepresentational antinarrative practices, this chapter focuses on the role of narrative in the popular and ubiquitous representational narrative cinema. Basic concepts of story, plot and medium are introduced, followed by three types of representational narrative cinema, introduced via examples: classical Hollywood (the opening of Psycho), art cinema (The Weight of Water) and “puzzle films” (Lost Highway), the latter designating a recent type of storytelling in contemporary representational cinema that manipulates and challenges (but does not eliminate) narrative.

The terminology of narrative theory is notoriously complex and contradictory.