Fictional film

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Fictional film or narrative film uses chronological reality to tell a fictional story. Film scholars consider the fictional film to be one of the major styles of filmmaking, along with the experimental film and the documentary film.

Unlike literary fiction, the fictional film has a real referent, called the pro-filmic, which encompasses everything existing and done in front of the camera. Only in fictional filmmaking, the pro-filmic represents a different, diegetic meaning: sets serve as locations and actors as characters.

Since the emergence of classical Hollywood style in the early 20th century, narrative, usually in the form of the feature film, has held dominance in commercial cinema and has become popularly synonymous with "the movies." Classical, invisible filmmaking (what is often called "realist" fiction) is central to this popular definition. Certain films, however, have more experimental fictions (the work of Alain Resnais or neo-noir like Memento, for example), and Hollywood in itself has loosened some of its rules since the 1970s, adopting what some have called a "post-classical" style.

Fictional film

See also