[sjm]

Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.

[mrob]

>Mulholland Drive

From the article:

"One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car crash; Betty’s quest to help Rita rediscover her true identity. I believe that one reason we don’t object, don’t groan with boredom, is that the scaffolding is – crucially – hidden."

I liked the movie, and I approve of this kind of creativity, but a disguised 3-act structure is still a 3-act structure.

[strogonoff]

A fun thing about story frameworks is that with a bit of creativity you can usually make any story conform to any framework you wish, both when writing or when analyzing someone’s work (maybe the actual protagonist is the city of Omelas or all of its residents, collectively).

The corollary is that the framework that we tend to over-focus on is not necessarily what makes or breaks the story.

Lately I am thinking that a good and accessible story is a challenge in map-making and map-breaking. First, you speak the language the audience understands, employ some baseline map of reality that everyone gets. Then, you take them on a journey showing how it is faulty, and maybe end up with a better map.

(A good story does not have to be universally accessible, of course. It can self-select a narrower audience. I suspect a lot of Ursula Le Guin’s work is like that.)

[card_zero]

OK, now let's find a way to see it as a four-act structure. Introduction: car crash. Development: woman with amnesia and blue key. Turning point: take your pick, remembering a name, the corpse maybe. Outcome: silencio.

[klik99]

Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.