Let’s build a story. Introduction to film narration, 2021 

This brief study by Joanna Preizner is a publication for the novice. The author writes with passion, fluency and love about movies and the way they tell us stories every day. Everyone, who would like to understand what makes moving images clear and attractive, intelligent and engaging, touching and thrilling, and has no time to go deep into academic papers or university handbooks, should reach for this subjective and selective, but also unpretentious, fully original compendium. It allows us to understand why we can talk about movies till early morning hours, quoting dialogues from them and acting out some chosen film scenes.

Professor Kamila Żyto

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The reader of this book, page by page, will go deeper and deeper into the world of cinematic narratives, gradually learning to understand how they are structured. They will learn how it is possible that, in fact, with so little information, we are able to believe film characters – believe in the world they live in and see a story lasting many days, months or years in a conglomerate of scenes and sequences. Of course, my script does not cover all the issues related to the cinematic narrative. This publication is intended primarily as a textbook for students participating in my academic course and as a user-friendly, popular science book addressed to the readers who are simply interested in cinema. I would like to show them the most common ways of shaping a film story, hoping that after reading this publication, they will look at feature films a bit more carefully. That they will see not only “some” stories in them, but also precise constructions consisting of many bricks and layers. Each of them must be carefully thought out, planned and implemented so that they can create an extraordinary whole – a feature film.

Joanna Preizner, PhD 

Web & Photos by Lech Mikulski