Genre and Narrative Structure

For films to appeal to specific audience, they must be from a specific "genre", genre can be best described as an overall style and this is displayed through the world, characters and story of the film. A good example of this would be a horror film, the most obvious genre, this is considered to be part of the horror genre through it's use of suspense, atmosphere and the story normally goes along the lines of one of the several smaller genres i.e. Supernatural, Fantasy and psychological.

However, the amount of genres has massively increased since the beginning of film due to the inclusion of "sub-genres" which as already explained, are specific styles of that genre this can include "dark comedy" and even "romantic adventure".

 

Narrative Structure

For a film to be truly effective, it must have a basic but crucial structure and that is to contain a beginning, middle and end. The ending can be varied and either have an open ending and this can either be used as a hint to a sequel or it can be used to give the audience an opinion into how the film ended. Or the film can end properly and answer all the questions that the intro of the film introduced, most films follow this structure, a good example would be: The first three films of Star Wars, in which the characters are presented with a problem in the first film of the trilogy, they spend the films fighting this issue and eventually in the third film, they defeat the villain and solve whatever problems they were presented with, this could be easily explained as he ABC method or a linear story.

However, certain films can follow a less simple method, this is called a non-linear story, this is normally along the lines of time travel or a more common method of this would be to use different perspectives or to start from the end and slowly work up to this finale through the use of memories or recordings, the best example of this would be Tarantino's Jackie Brown or Pulp Fiction, a film that suddenly rewinds and heads back to the beginning of the film, however the story is then portrayed from a separate characters viewpoint.

Another structure would be to slowly circulate back around and end up where the movie began, this is normally done through the use of beginning at the end of the film, flashing back to the start of the plot and slowly working back to the finale, this style of structure isn't as common but a film that uses this same structure would be Fight Club in which the intro clearly portrays the ending before suddenly flipping several weeks earlier in the plot and slowly working it's way back to the finale.