American Narrative Studies of Film: Between Formalism and Postmodernism.

The article discusses contemporary cinema. Poststructuralist theory decisively transformed the structuralist project of elaborating the specific codes of the language of film. The place of contemporary film as a narrative form is, in a society transformed by television. The formalist project is one of preservation of stability of psychological causality as the basis for the representation of human action in an ideal fiction called the fabula. It is an effort to preserve this classic moment of film through the transcendental categories of Kantian epistemology and aesthetics vested finally in the figure of the ideal spectator.