Non-narrative film  

"The episodic narrative tradition which Aristotle indicates has systematically been subverted in the 20th century modernism. This is particularly true in the experimental cinematic tradition where the folding and reversal of episodic narrative is now a commonplace. Moreover, modernist writers and modernist film directors seem more concerned that plot is an encumbrance to their artistic medium than an assistance."

When one reads Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” the title makes one wonder if there is a thing such a thing as non-narrative cinema.

A key text concerned with the subversion of conventional narrative and plot during the postwar years is Amos Vogel’s chapter 4 in his Film as a Subversive Art, titled the destruction of plot and narrative, in which he cites Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Burroughs, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, Bresson, Godard, Skolimowski, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Eisenstein, Man Ray, Richter, Epstein, Brakhage, Peterson, Bartlett, Tzara, Breton and Buñuel. At the end of this chapter, Vogel adds that the commercially successful films are still the ones that employ 19th century plot structures such as Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music and Love Story.

--Sholem Stein