Although entertainment-education narratives are increasingly being used to communicate health information to a diversity of populations, there is limited evidence examining the use of narrative health education videos in low compared with adequate health literacy populations. There are also very few studies directly comparing narrative materials to more traditional, non-narrative materials. Bec...

I have worked with several substance-misusing clients who, despite my best efforts, adamantly adhere to their problematic narrative and cannot participate in re-storying their experience in a meaningful manner. The purpose of this article is to outline an alternative technique of using films to help substance-misusing clients generate a positive metaphor for their lived experiences. Using this ...

OBJECTIVES We compared the relative efficacy of a fictional narrative film to a more traditional nonnarrative film in conveying the same health information. METHODS We used a random digit dial procedure to survey the cervical cancer-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of non-Hispanic White, Mexican American, and African American women, aged 25 to 45 years, living in Los Angeles, Califo...

In his article "Towards an Urban Narrative Layers Approach to Decipher the Language of City Films" François Penz investigates how film narratives may provide us with the perceptual tools to grasp complex urban phenomena. He posits that, in order to elicit the mechanisms that make up the projected image of city films, new analytical tools need to be devised. Penz demonstrates that the cinematic ...

Cinematic tradition suggests that Hollywood films, like plays, are divided into acts. Thompson (1999) streamlined the conception of this largescale film structure by suggesting that most films are composed of four acts of generally equal length—the setup, the complicating action, the development, and the climax (often including an epilog). These acts are based on the structure of the narrative,...

Social norms are an important predictor of health behavior and have been targeted by a variety of health communication campaigns. However, these campaigns often encounter challenges related to the socially specific context in which norms exist: specifically, the extent to which the target population identifies with the reference group presented in the ad and the extent to which the target popul...

In this paper, we propose a novel method for performing high-level narrative structure extraction of films. Our objective is to utilize the knowledge of film production for analyzing and extracting the structure of films. This is achieved by combining visual and aural cues on the basis of cinematic principles. An aesthetic model is developed to integrate visual and aural cues (aesthetic fields)...

This article is concerned with the relationship of language and city in Amir Naderi’s trilogy of films on New York, comprising of Manhattan by Numbers (1993), A, B, C… Manhattan (1997), and Marathon (2002). By dint of a narrative relied on spatiality, he is in fact able to causally link the solitude and the spectral existence of his protagonists to the lack of a common language for reco...