Action and Image: Dramatic Structure in Cinema

The concern of film theorists to read films as texts has led them to neglect the equally pressing need to see films as drama. Roy Armes sets out to redress the balance by drawing on the insights offered by recent developments in the theoretical study of drama and performance. Like plays, films can be analyzed as hybrid entities, comprising both a drama text (the script) and a performance text (the realization of this script in audio-visual terms). Applying this fundamental distinction to film allows a questioning of the dominant literary models of film narrative and throws new light on basic questions of narration and authorship. Issues relating to plot and protagonist are explored through detailed analysis of the structure of a wide range of readily accessible classic films. Throughout, the concern is to reformulate concepts in terms which will be as relevant to those involved in practice (writing or directing films and tapes) as to those concerned solely with narrative theory.