August 29, 2005 Introductory Stuff
Something magical happens when you enter a theater, sit in the dark with scores of other eyes with similar visual training and let a filmmaker transport you elsewhere. It is at once both a personal and shared experience, tied both to the inner folds of your imagination and all sorts of cultural norms and shared history.
Movies work; people watch them, lots and lots of people ranging from those who work hard to understand the machinery within them to extreme non-intellectuals out for a rich experience of some kind.
This little book is an exploration of one of the parts of the machinery. It is about the key thing that makes movies work, I think, the central trick behind getting you to put yourself into the story. I'm engaged in this because it is fun: after all half (at least) the enjoyment of movies is thinking and talking about them afterwards.
As a result, I hope to treat this project in a way that is fun for the reader. I do not plan to use any technical jargon from the applicable theoretical literature where it might apply. I think that esoteric language needlessly gets in the way is actually wrong in most cases and isn't sensitive to the way minds really work, at least the minds engaged in lucidly watching films.
In other words, I hope this is fun. I've created a large concept which I call "folding" which includes most of the varieties of a the main trick screenwriters, indeed all writers, use.
This document consists of small, integrated essays that I add to or revise over time. It consists of four main sections. This is the beginning of the first section, the one that defines what folding is, provides a summary and overview of key ideas and deals with other high level questions about the study and motivations.
A second section is the main meat of the matter. It lists the types of folding and gives brief examples from movies I have seen. Those brief examples each link to a third section which has a "chapter" for each example film. Those pages give some basic information about the movie including the relevant story bits and a slightly larger exposition of the folding type. That page also includes the IMDB comment I wrote shortly after seeing or reseeing the film for this project.
(There will be many films in the comments database that are not used as examples. These you can browse via the database search functionalities on this site.)
A fourth section is located between the "types of folding" and the "examples" sections. This is where I attempt to tease out a useful history of folding including literature as far back as we can go.
If you want to track what has been added or changed, there is a
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As the title indicates, this is a website about folding in film.
"Folding" is a term we have coined to collect a variety of related narrative techniques that are widely used in movies of all kinds. You can see folding in films from the very beginning of the form. Indeed, just this type of intellectual play has had a home in all sorts of storytelling as far back as we know.
Folding includes all sorts of techniques of overlapping narrative, spanning from overarching metaphor to stories within stories. Sometimes, the story within is the story itself; in other words the folding may be that the story is about or recognizes itself in some way. Conventional film theory clumsily calls this "reflexivity" as if mere "reflection" was too plain a word.
We include that form together with many others that span from movies within movies all the way to the use of "heavy metaphor," where a coherent story is used to illuminate another included story. A common example is the plot about a struggling sports hero who is simultaneously struggling with love. (The "performance" of sport is often a different kind of fold within the performance of the film.)
There are lots and lots of different types of folds, which I detail in another section. I group them all together because it is clear when you see them this way that they are all part of the same phenomenon, the same simples tricks in narrative storytelling. They all conform to the same simple laws.
To my knowledge, you are reading the very first exploration of this consolidated view of folding. Consequently, the principles described here are unique, though nearly all intelligent filmmakers (and some actors) knowingly follow them in other guises.
The goal here is to have fun discovering a side of movies that you probably hadn't thought about before. Thousands of examples are presented, and I hope you immediately make connections with familiar films. I pledge to "stay in the world of the movie" which is to say that the explanation of the moviemaking cannot be more complex than the movie is itself.
You do have to think about the movies and how they are put together, but the ideas and terms I use are more or less plain English. Poke me if I fall into jargon.
