Narrative Theories in film

Colin MacCabe was representative of the rising resistance toward ideas of classic realism, a resistance motivated by French Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, especially the work of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan.

One of the most important shifts in narrative analysis began in the 1960s with the French theorist Christian Metz, who built upon linguistic theory, including that of Ferdinand de Saussure, to bring structural analysis into film scholarship. Metz, along with Roland Barthes, set the groundwork for much of subsequent work on narrative, including the shift toward dialogue analysis.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many narrative theorists increasingly shifted from defining the narrative case to explaining the process known as enunciation. One influential linguist was Émile Benveniste. For Benveniste, story (histoire) tries to conceal its marks of communication, presenting itself in an unfriendly, objective manner.

French and British theorists as diverse as Jean-Louis Baudry, Colin MacCabe, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Stephen Heath became increasingly troubled with the cinema's ability to "position the subject."

Narrative and spectatorship consequently became key concerns for feminist theorists. Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Annette Kuhn in particular directed feminist attention beyond the narrative surface of patriarchal main-stream cinema. Issues of race, class, and gender went beyond categorization types of representations and were analyzed throughout the cinema's camerawork, editing, soundtrack, and plot structures.

While much of the theoretical legacy of enunciation theories of narrative, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies continues to thrive and inform film studies, it often reduces narrative analysis to serving as symptoms for larger social issues.
Moreover, the theorist and historian David Bordwell argued that enunciation theory remains too intensely obliged to verbal communication to be fully related to the cinematic experience.

Many narrative theorists refused to reduce spectators to passive, predetermined subjects, but rather posited active participants in the production of meaning. Bordwell argued for a cognitive-based investigation of film practice and found that Russian Formalism, with its precise attention to story, plotting, and style, provided a methodology that functions well with cognitive vocabulary to reveal how spectators perceive and process cinematic images and sounds to comprehend narrative.
Murray Smith enlivened the area of spectator identification, offering a highly functional grid to understand how films cue audiences to sympathize and identify with fictional characters.