Further Thoughts on Measuring Narrational Complexity in Fiction Film

Abstract

Cutting (2021) argues that the narrational complexity of fiction film can be quantified similarly to computational measures of text complexity. Narrational complexity refers to the structure that arises from how a story is told. This article expands upon Cutting's proposal by taking inspiration from contemporary approaches for measuring text complexity. These approaches reject the notion that complexity can be measured via a limited set of indices as Cutting proposed for narrational complexity. Similarly, we argue that narrational complexity for fiction films should be multi-dimension and include indices that are associated with events, characters, and the rules that govern the fictional world. We discuss the viability of using computational approaches to analyze video and natural language processing to develop approaches to measuring narrational complexity.