Procedural Schema

Procedural schema contains ‘operational protocols’ which may help the viewer comprehend a film when its narrative, stylistic and genre schemas are inadequate. The search for information and framing inferences follows ‘some conventions by which viewers justify textual elements’ (Bordwell, 1985:37). However, there are some situations in which viewers encounter a textual cue in a film that does not fit within their film narrative, stylistic or genre schemas. In such cases, viewers justify such elements in terms of the ‘motivations’ which the film text offers by generating hypothesis derived from procedural-schema. Bordwell (1985:37-38) distinguishes four motivational attributes, namely, ‘compositional’, ‘realistic’, ‘transtextual’, and ‘artistic’. Bordwell’s transtextual motivation corresponds to what in this research is classified as a separate category and termed ‘genre schema’. Categorizing genre schema as a separate schema is mainly because genre, as ‘the most prominent kind of schema, informs our reading of a narrative text’ (Toolan, 2009:5).

Further, where a film component deviates from viewer’s narrative and genre schema, they can find recourse by calling on specific motivational attributes/qualities. In other words, viewers may seek to gain understanding by justifying the anomalous element either artistically, realistically or compositionally. For instance, viewers may attempt to rationalise a spacecraft explosion in a SF film by drawing on different motivations: compositionally by raising the hypothesis that the film narrative needs a climactic ending; realistically by holding that the scientific calculations do not work out as the astronaut expects; or artistically that the spacecraft explosion choreography may have fascinated the director. Viewers who are accustomed to the stylistic, generic and narrative traditions of mainstream film may draw on procedural schema to comprehend other less conventional stylistic options (Bordwell, 1985:37). However, there are moments in films in which none of the artistic, compositional and realistic justifications/motivations is adequate to enable a clear understanding. This may take place when unusual and/or seemingly anomalous information is presented in the film text which initially may not seem related to the story context, as in the case of LSs or ELSs or bird’s-eye views of cities at the beginning of an opening sequence. Magliano et

al. (1996:219) assert viewers can explain such anomalous information by generating a ‘causal explanatory reasoning’ or ‘explanation-based inferences’ that connects it with the prior (or future) story context. This means that viewers tend to motivate anomalous information by reasoning or explaining it. Such account is also consistent with Bordwell’s (1985) artistic, generic, compositional and realistic justification explanation, as in both cases viewers try to comprehend the anomalous element by motivating and explaining it in different ways. For instance, in a scene in François Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door (1981) we see a man driving fast in a car, which is not related to past scenes, but to future events. A few scenes later we understand that he was heading home although, at that very instant, we found that we were unable to explain this event. Viewers tend to motivate such hard-to-understand scenes in different ways. For instance, they may generate a prediction in order to determine the relevance of incongruous scenes in terms of future events: they might hypothesise that ‘what the man is really doing or where he is really heading is probably going to be revealed in the next scene’, for example. Accordingly, by employing justification, motivation or explanation, viewers can determine the consequences of new information.

In the current study, viewers’ explanation, motivation and reasoning are categorised under the general rubric of ‘procedural schema’, on which they may draw when they feel unable to understand particular elements of film at different levels, including characters, narrative and film style and technique.

2.8 Summary

This chapter was concerned with viewer’s general knowledge of the world, its structure and its representation in film comprehension. The chapter argued that in order to understand film characters, viewers may draw on their prior knowledge in form of various schemas.

A cognitive model was suggested which argues the general knowledge for understanding film characters and making impressions about them consists of three planes: namely social schema, film schema and pragmalinguistic schema. This chapter particularly focused on the first two cognitive planes, social and film schemas, their specifications, and how they are utilized in forming impressions about characters. The pragmalinguistic knowledge, as the third plane, is discussed in the next chapter.

This chapter started with a critical review of literary criticism theories with regard to character and how they approach it. Having recognized the ‘humanizing’ and ‘dehumanizing’ approaches as too extremist, following Culpeper’s (2001) mixed approach, this research posits the interdependence and interrelation of character and plot. This means characters can be regarded, comprehended and interpreted in terms of social cognitive theories which were originally devised for comprehension of real-life people. Believing in the human-like nature of characters allows us to make use of such real-people-focused social cognitive theories to comprehend characters in film. However, this chapter also acknowledged that characters are also the product of plot and hence, they are fictional. It discussed how characters are created, presented and developed in film by means of multimodal devices. A toolkit was also suggested for character creation in film, which takes into account film-specific style and techniques.

The structure of viewer’s general knowledge about the world – categories and schemas and their related theories, prototype theory and schema theory, respectively – was discussed, followed by a description of the approaches to impression formation. The specifications of Fiske and Neuberg’s (1990) continuum model for impression formation were discussed, which takes into account both schematic (top-down) and categorization (bottom-up) processes. This impression formation model is used as the model (at social level) in the present study.

Following the present study’s research assumption that film is indeed a multimodal medium, film text involves a specific structure of narrative elements and a stylistic system of its own. To understand character – as the fabricated entities in the fictional text of film – the viewer’s prior knowledge should involve the knowledge of film style and techniques. Film knowledge, as another type of prior knowledge, is cognitively accumulated in the course of viewers’ encounters with films. The viewers’ film schema was described as having four (sub)schemas including narrative, genre, style and procedural schemas. Viewers’ film schemas are activated by film textual cues as they watch.

3. Schematic knowledge in character impression formation.