This is a big post. Perhaps too big. But I have thought and written quite a
lot on plot and narrative inference, so I thought I would share some of my
thoughts.

I think that it is worth saying that there is nothing in a film but plot.
This claim, of course, implies that I would like to define the term plot
such that the claim was true. Plot may sometimes be used to mean a map of a
film - maybe a map that sketches the narrative logic of the film (- as
Roland Barthes said all narrative allows of a summary) - but it is
ultimately one of those maps that can be big enough to be identical or
isomorphic to the thing mapped. Plot is another term for narrative argument.
It is necessarliy temporally ordered.

Whether we understand the plot is another thing. All narrative argument is
open to many interpretations. This is obvious when we are half way through a
film and we cannot predict how it is going to end. The meaning is always
open enough or ambiguous enough to head off anywhere. Indeed during the
experience of a narrative we are running many possible plots that refer to
many possible worlds. Even at the end - even at the end of the most, as
they say, closed, films there is still enough openess for a sequel. All
narratives allow sequels.

The old narratological distinction between the chronological order of
storyline and the poetic order of plot (ie the order of the exposition of
narrative argument) is related to the distinction between actual and
possible worlds in counterfactual logic. We are inveterate counterfactual
reasoners. We have to be. There are many possible worlds we have to conceive
of just in order to understand the actual world. We live in many worlds, not
one. This is part of the nature of all narrative and the nature of our
narrative reason. It is also why fiction is an especially narrative kind of
thing.

Understanding - a somewhat ambiguous term itself - implies things like an
end that ties up the most relevant open strings in the narrative,
reconciling them with the expectations we bring to a film from our previous
knowledges of genre, the empirical world, or wherever.

Ambiguity may be the very thing a film is signifying. Films (and other
narrative arts) are always producing emotional experiences such as that of
ambiguity in order to objectify that experience as part of the significance
of the film. To grasp or assert the precise meaning of the end of Bunuels
Belle de jour or to trace the references of Godards Helas pour moi to a
precise set and order of characters and events, or to ask of Lynchs Lost
Highway - is it real or is it a dream? as if this would sort out the
fictional facts from the fictional phantasms - all these are beside the
point. Unfathomability is an emblem, in film, of historys utter specificity,
and its resistance to schematic, reductive generalities.

A few more films of more or less unfathomability (sometimes it vanishes
somewhat on second or third viewing) that I have seen recently on video come
to mind just now. The Wind Will Carry Us, Mirror, Trois couronnes du matelot
(Ruiz is always good for this and his wonderful book Poetics of Cinema is
relevant here), Yes, and films about counter espionage. Sometimes too,
unfathomabilty is just a matter of one's epistemic limitations - whether
they be lack of experience of a genre, missing a simple cue, lack of
specific cultural knowledge, difficulty of argument, etc.

Looking at film narrative in terms of the nature of its argument and the
nature of our narrative inference: Narratives are unavoidably descriptions
of uncertain truth about sequences of events whose meaning or outcome is
also uncertain. Both the plot and the events represented could have happened
absolutely otherwise. The problem of the truth of narratives is both a
problem of the adequacy of depictions of temporal phenomena that happen once
only, and of the temporal variability of the adequacy of a depiction as it
unfolds and afterwards as it watched and rewatched in new circumstances. Two
depictions of the same sequence of events, or even the same film at
different stages of its showing may be adequate for some particular purpose.
One may lack sufficient causal information for a particular purpose, or it
may only consist of a schematic subset of events deemed relevant by the
other. Variations in truth over time, and in the context of different
functional requirements, belong to the general problem of the uncertainty of
narrative depictions - a problem traditionally conceived philosophically
under the concept of contingency. Contingency is a matter of the uncertainty
of temporal sequences - of the uncertainty of a sequence of events and the
uncertainty of its representation. In the statistical analysis of temporal
sequences, uncertainty, entropy and information amount to the same thing.
The information and therefore the meaning a narrative conveys is related to
our sense of its contingency.

Being confused and in the middleof things is as much part of narrative
experience as the closure of understanding. I dont like the word, or the
value of closure. In the context of new information we realise that an
earlier description of a sequence means something other than we at first
thought. In a seemingly random sequence that seems to be arbitrarily leading
us through an utterly particular branch of the labyrinthine order of
historical possibility, we experience the baffling character of information.
It is this sublime burden of entropy that I admire in a film like Short
Cuts, more than its eventual reduction in the subsequent dovetailing of and
short cutting between stories, or in the unifying earthquake ending.

Ross Macleay