Como as dificuldades para a realização do aborto legal ferem os direitos fundamentais da mulher

What then are these elements that the spectator need to consider? A movie can be divided into seven elements: 1) script or narrative; 2) acting; 3) production design; 4) stage or directing; 5) cinematography;

6) editing; and 7) sound design.

Script or Narrative

The script is the basis of a movie. It provides the story that a movie presents to the spectator. This story is composed of several elements namely:

1) Characters 2) Dialogue 3) Setting 4) Plot Characters

Are the agents of an act that constitutes an event. They are usually persons --- human beings --- but there are occasions that animals, machines, ordinary things, and fantastic creatures play the role of characters in an animated film. There are two basic types of characters in a movie: protagonists and antagonists.

• Protagonists - are the main characters in movies. The protagonist causes the chain of events that will unfold. The narrative usually centers on the actions that this character does to achieve his goal.

Superwant - is a term used to describe principle that drives the protagonist to do what he does; a deep inner longing of a character which impels him to act. It is to satisfy this desire that makes the character put himself in out-of-the-ordinary situations.

For a spectator, knowing the superwant is important to understanding the motivations and actions of both the protagonist and the antagonist.

• Antagonists - are characters that oppose the protagonists. An antagonist’s sole aim is to prevent the protagonist from acquiring his goal thus thwarting the acquisition of the superwant.

Ordinarily, the antagonist is another character that is the polar opposite of the protagonist, but there are occasions when the antagonist is not even a person.

Sometimes animals, monsters, machines, nature, in fact anything imaginable can be used as an antagonist in a movie.

There are also instances that the protagonist also functions as the antagonist which is the case in most psychological movies. It is important to note that the protagonist-antagonist paradigm does not equal the hero-villain paradigm. Not all protagonists are good people.

Take for example the numerous movies involving thieves as protagonists like Bonnie and Clyde or Ocean’s series or the local bio-pics about criminals of the late 70s to the mid 80s like Ben Tumbling and Alias Waray.

These protagonists are not exactly paragons of virtue. In the same way, not all antagonists are villainous. The same movies that revolve around the life of criminals often have good people as antagonists. The cop that chases and arrests or kills the criminal is not the bad person;

he may actually be the good guy. This protagonist-antagonist paradigm belongs to the form of the movie while the hero-villain paradigm falls under its content. The former is a technical tool, something used in creating the narrative while the latter is more a tool used to define characters.

Character Traits

Are personal qualities that a character possesses. They are important because these make a character convincing. Knowing the character traits allow the spectator to empathize and root for some characters and despise others. It also explains why certain characters act in a particular way. Traits also explain the actions a character takes to achieve his goal. Anything a character does that does not coincide with the traits he possess is considered an action done out-of-character and is a mark of inconsistency.

Being aware of character traits also makes it possible for a spectator to construct hypotheses on how characters will act. The confirmation and rejection of these hypotheses trigger reactions from the spectator --- reactions that constitute an indispensable part of the cinematic experience. The tension that flows from the formulation of a hypotheses and the confirmation or rejection of it is one of the causes of excitement.

Character traits are revealed through what the character says, chooses and does. While watching then, the spectator needs to account for the patterns that emerge with regard to these things. This will enable him to tract how the character develops throughout the whole movie.

Dialogue

It is composed of the words that a character utters. In sound movies, dialogue is delivered orally by the actors but in silent movies, dialogues is shown as text inserted between shots. Perhaps the most expected function of dialogue in cinema is the same as the function it serves in everyday life, to reveal the thoughts of characters. These thoughts are, more often than not, unfilmable, i.e. very difficult, even impossible to express visually. For some radical directors, this is the only justification for dialogue --- to express orally what cannot be otherwise expressed visually.

Oftentimes, dialogue becomes a major element spectators consciously use to understand the ideas a movie is expressing. Ask someone to point to something in the movie that will support what he understands to be the idea being expressed and chances are… he will quote from a line of dialogue. This reliance on dialogue perhaps originates from the fact that people primarily use verbal language to communicate their thoughts and, sometimes, feelings. And since cinema, with the exception of animation, is very naturalistic, allowing the spectator to easily overcome the limits set by the medium and experience the subject as if first hand, it is almost automatic for every spectator to pay very close attention to dialogue.

Dialogue can serve as a means to explicitly state the point of the movie. It can also function as a tool to reveal character. The choice of words, for example can reveal the type of character the spectator is watching. Scatological quips revel a juvenile pervert, incomprehensible technical jargon characterizes a college geek, aphoristic phrases mark a sage, and so on.

Setting

It is the spatial and temporal locus of the events in the plot. It ensures that events enacted by the characters happen in a particular place and time. More than spatially and temporally containing the events, the setting also contributes to the narrative by providing the context of the action. To some extent, the setting shapes the characters and events by providing the basic assumptions the movie uses. It gives the spectator a framework in which to “participate” in the events. The setting shapes the world that the movie presents to the spectator. And the spectator should respond to the movie based on the context provided by the setting. If the setting makes it possible for a man to fly or for hobbits to roam the fields, then the spectator should accept it.

The setting disposes the spectator to the suspension of disbelief.

Plot

It is the arrangements or sequence of events and the things that are shown on the screen. It is sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably with story but the two are different.

Story and Plot, a Distinction

Story and plot are actually two different, though related things. This lack of distinction is due to the fact that both the story and plot deal with the same thing, i.e., actions or events that take place in the movie. But closer study reveals that there are two very important differences between the two.

The first has something to do with the sequencing of events while the other refers to the quantity of narrative information present. With regard

to sequence, story events are always ordered chronologically while plot events are not necessarily so. A plot may be temporally disjointed, relying heavily on flashbacks or flash-forwards. There are occasional movie plots that deliberately blur and confuse the temporal structure of the narrative.

When the spectator watches, what he sees are the events are ordered in the plot. And while watching, he needs to understand how each event temporally relates to other events. This means that he needs to mentally situate events in their chronological place. Understanding the story thus requires an active mental chronological re-ordering of the plot events.

In this sense, the plot events serve as raw material in the attempt to mentally construct the story. The story is a result of re-ordering the plot events. The plot is what the spectator watches; the story is what he mentally possesses after re-ordering the plot. To make sense of events, the spectator considers certain things that he sees, hears and infers in the movie and relates them with each other. These things:

actions, persons, voices, noises, buildings, cars, etc. form what is called diegesis - which Bordwell and Thompson define as “ the total world of the story action.”

As the definition suggests, all the narrative or diegetic information present in the movie constitutes the story content. The plot, on the other hand, simply contains diegetic information that the spectator actually sees and hear. Some diegetic information may simply be hinted or altogether ignored in the plot. The plot also includes visual and aural elements that are neither present nor essential to the story’s deigesis like some instances of voice-over narration.

Background music, inter-titles, superimposed texts, etc. (Bordwell and Thompson 61-62) These things are not present in the world of the story in that the characters do not hear or seem them; only the spectator does. These non-diegetic elements contribute not so much to the articulation of the story but serve to create and or enhance the effect that the movie has on the spectator. Moreover, the plot also presents some information that does not contribute anything to the flow of the story but is nonetheless present to emphasize ideas related to the meaning and purpose of the movie. The most basic goal of a spectator is to follow the plot and then mentally construct the story using plot information.

On top of this, the spectator also needs to think about the intended meanings or purposes of the movie as elaborated by the plot that do not directly affect the casual flow of the story. The point of the movie becomes clear after considering the information contained in both the story and the plot. The events in the plot are caused by a protagonist driven by a superwant and meets antagonists which prevent him from achieving his goal. Conflicts arise as the protagonist struggles to overcome the obstacles presented by the antagonists.

These events unfold in three major parts:

Beginnings - introduce the major characters especially the protagonist and establishes his superwant and the conflict.

Middles - contain the series of events that the protagonist goes through to fulfill his goal.

Ends - begin with the climax when the protagonist and antagonist meet in a final confrontation and continue in the denouement which shows

the aftereffects of the climax and finally complete the movie in the resolution.

A plot can resolve in three possible ways:

• reward the desire

• frustrate the desire

• leave the resolution open

Not all plots are done in this conventional way, though. There are some plot structures that do not follow the cause and effect principle throughout the whole movie. The more common of these is the episodic plot. This kind of plot divides the movie into a series of self-contained units that are not related causally.

These units are called episodes. Episodes are small conventional plots, meaning each of them has its own beginning, middle and end. An episodic movie strings together these episodes and usually unites them with the presence of a single character in each. These episodes may also be linked by a common theme. To make sense of an episodic movie, the spectator needs to understand the plot of each episode and discover how each of the episodes relates to each other to bring out the meaning of the movie.

In well written movies of this kind, the episodes may not be clearly defined from each other. They may be inter-weaved, with episodes unfolding gradually as events from each alternate as the movie progresses. A spectator gains access to the script content through visual and aural elements employed by film makers. These elements are the raw materials that the spectator processes to follow the events presented by the movie.