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ABSTRACT 

The invitation to this conference presents an impressive collection of narrative strategies for capturing the audio-visual expression of our time. The question is whether narrative analyses in themselves are sufficient for this task. Maybe we could, for a start, exclude the film’s narrative and look at it promptly as an audio-visual object. This will also possibly free us from the filmmaker's intensions with and design of the story and instead focus on an audience's experience and interpretation of the film’s audio-visuals.

In my talk, I discuss the possibility of analysing cinematic works from the idea that each film in itself creates a world with its own aesthetics, topography, rules and values. This world could be more or less realistic, every-day or unique, but it is the frame of reference from which we understand the film.

The term ”film world” is used by the commercially conditioned "transmedia storytelling" as well as by artistic orientations. The similarity between the two is that they both communicate with the audience through common ground - knowledge and experiences that we share. Movies are entities, worlds, that interact audio-visually with other worlds through referencing. Not only concrete elements such as scenography, props, lightning, but also symbols and signs, morals and value markings, point out the relationship. The film audience is looking – consciously or unconsciously - for similarities and differences between the audio-visual presentations and their own real world as well as other fictional or actual ones that they have experienced. A connotative interpretation that is difficult to capture in narrative analyses, it is of a different dimension. To reach an understanding we need to see the cinematic "world" as a cohesive artistic space, a place that is loaded with chosen elements into a rich, complex unit.

Moving further one can say that filmmaking is in fact re-making. A filmmaker does not come up with a film from nothing. He or she uses existing building blocks, in a way that forms a personal and unique construction. These building blocks are "references": quoted, paraphrased, fragmented from an already existing film, work of art or authentic reality with their original context and now given a new context in the composition, the cinematic world. As analysts we would have to immerse into this world, to fully understand it.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that in addressing an audio-visual production, we regard it as an object, separate from its maker: a world with selected references that communicates with us through the film's complex multimodality. We can understand the references through recognition and pointers to other worlds and we can also analyse the interplay between the

referential worlds and the one build by the film itself. Then we can move to the narrative’s interaction with this world.