Briefly explain how the spectator helps create the movie’s narrative along with the filmmaker, and how the movie’s genre affects this narrative relationship

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. For a spectator, it’s impossible to understand a movie without being actively engaged in a dynamic interplay with its narrative logic. Most of us have been watching movies and television for so long that we’re hardly aware of our instantaneous adjustments to an unfolding plot.
2. We absorb auditory and visual stimuli at an incredibly rapid rate. Like a complex computer, our brain click-clicks away in many language systems simultaneously: photographic, spatial, kinetic, vocal, histrionic, musical, sartorial, and so on.
3. We also attempt to superimpose our sense of order and coherence on the film’s world. In most cases, we bring a set of expectations to a movie even before we’ve seen it. Our knowledge of a given era or genre leads us to expect a predictable set of variables. For example, most westerns take place in the late nineteenth century and are set in the American western frontier. From books, television, and other westerns, we have a rough knowledge of how frontier people were supposed to dress and behave.
4. When narratives fail to act according to tradition, convention, or our sense of history, we
are forced to reassess our cognitive methods and our attitude toward the narrative. Either we
adjust to the author’s presentation, or we reject the offending innovation as inappropriate,
crude, or self-indulgent.
5. A filmmaker’s narrative strategy is often determined by genre. For example, in genres that thrive on suspense (thrillers, police stories, mysteries), the narrative will deliberately withhold information, forcing the spectator to guess, to fill in the gaps. In romantic comedies, on the other hand, the spectator generally knows the outcome in advance, so the narrative emphasis is on how boy wins girl (or vice versa), not if he or she wins.