In this weeks reading on narrative form, we learn how events in film unfold through causality, time, and space within a coherent diegesis, the film’s world of story action. Temporal relations, such as order and duration, also guide how audiences process the story such as whether events are shown chronologically or through flashbacks and repetitions. This structure provides clarity, creates emotional and thematic unity, and leads viewers toward resolution and meaning.
In my favorite film, About Time (Curtis, 2013), narrative form is approached in a unique way, because the main character, Tim, is able to time travel to points in his life. The film plays with temporal order by repeating events in new variations, allowing viewers to compare how choices shape meaning. Duration, or how time is represented, varies across the film from quick rewinds to long stretches of lived experience. By the end, when Tim stops time traveling and embraces the present, the pacing slows. The audience feels the emotional weight of time by the end because the narrative stops manipulating it.
Tim’s narration unifies these shifts in time and space. His reflective voiceover anchors the audience during a nonlinear storyline, shaping understanding of both the story itself and his internal transformation throughout.
In Tom Gunning’s essay, he looks at an earlier stage of cinema before narrative form became dominant. He defines early film as a “cinema of attractions,” where the emphasis was on showing rather than telling. These films directly addressed the audience, highlighting spectacle, novelty, and surprise rather than character development or plot. Gunning argues that while later narrative cinema wanted to immerse viewers in a continuous story, the cinema of attractions invites awareness of the act of looking. Cinema was about the experience of seeing and being amazed by motion and illusion.
About Time also contains moments of cinematic attraction in Gunning’s sense. The time-travel sequences momentarily pull viewers out of the story to look at the visual spectacle of time manipulation itself. These instances seem to pause narrative progression for the purpose of emotional spectacle.
For example, when Tim relives an ordinary childhood day on the beach with his father after learning of his death, the scene functions less as narrative advancement and more as what Gunning would call a “cinema of attractions”: a moment of direct emotional address to the viewer. The slow pacing, golden lighting, and sense of suspended time invite viewers to live in the experience and be in awe of the ocean’s beauty with them, rather than think about the future. It’s an attraction not of shock, as in early cinema, but of sentiment—a spectacle of feeling. The story pauses and time itself seems to hold still. It’s not about narrative logic anymore but about emotion, the beauty of the moment, and the connection between father and son. These scenes remind viewers of film’s power to manipulate and reshape time and shape, creating a sense of wonder that is distinct from the plot’s emotional or overarching “romcom” narrative arc. It reminds viewers that Tim is not on a quest to fall in love with a woman, but rather on a quest to fall in love with life itself.
