Large-scale narrative events in popular cinema

Most experiments in event perception and cognition have focused on events that are only a few minutes in length, and the previous research on popular movies is consistent with this temporal scope. Scenes are generally between a few seconds and a few minutes in duration. But popular movies also offer an opportunity to explore larger events—variously called acts, major parts, or large-scale parts by film theorists—in which the boundaries often have few if any unique physical attributes. These units tend to be between about 20 to 35 min in duration. The present study had observers watch seven movies they had not seen before and, over the course of several days and with ample justifications, reflect on them, and then segment them into two to six parts with the aid of a running description of the narrative. Results showed consistency across viewers’ segmentations, consistency with film-theoretic segmentations, and superiority over internet subjects who had access to only the scenarios used by the movie viewers. Thus, these results suggest that there are large scale events in movies; they support a view that their events are organized meronomically, layered with units of different sizes and with boundaries shared across layers; and they suggest that these larger-scale events can be discerned through cognitive, not perceptual, means.