Narrative is story telling. Feature films, usually100-120 minutes long, are fictional narratives--those that tellfictional stories, or narratives. But how do films tell storiesin ways we can understand? Scholars in many fields claim that allhuman beings seem to tell stories as a way to make sense of humanexperience. That is, we take the random diverse stuff of everydayexperience and turn it into narratives. But even if thisnarrative impulse is "natural" to human beings,different cultures create distinct and different types ofnarratives, using different media or forms in which to tell orshow their stories. A person from one culture may find thenarrative forms of another culture quite incomprehensible. We mayacquire the ability to understand our own culture’s ways oftelling stories so unconsciously that those narrative forms seem"natural," something we were born knowing. But we arenot born knowing how to make sense of film stories, any more thanwe are born knowing how to read the English language. "Filmliteracy" is learned, as is the ability to "read"and make sense of film narratives. Films don’t usually callattention to how they are made, or ask viewers to reflectconsciously on how we learn to "read" and make sense offilm narrative. Yet film has its own semiotics, or aspecial system of "signs" and techniques for makingmeaning that film "literates" have learned to"read." Let’s start with film’s basic unitsof making meaning.

Shot is a single exposure,from a single camera, that records an image on film. The shot is thebasic "sign" or unit of the film’s image-meaningsystem, just as the word is the basic unit of oral andwritten language.

Basics Film-making: The Language Of Film