Journalism and Mass Communication, August 2015, Vol. 5, No.

8, 428-433
doi: 10.17265/2160-6579/2015.08.005

D
DAVID

PUBLISHING

Aristotle and Hollywood: Dramatic Structure From Ancient

It is fascinating to realize that even while Hollywood continually comes up with incredible special effects in films
such as Avatar (2009), the basic structure and development closely follows the guidelines for drama and
storytelling laid out by Aristotle in his The Poetics, written several thousand years ago. We are specifically
speaking of three act (beginning, middle, and ending) structure, focusing more on plot than character, and the need
for a final resolution (catharsis). But throughout literary and cinematic history, not everyone has followed these
rules. Ironically, we take a close look at the award-winning Greek director Theo Angelopoulos Ulysses Gaze
(1995) staring Harvey Keitel, as an example of a very non-Aristotelian approach to filmmaking and storytelling.
Angelopoulos film is character rather than plot centered on the Harvey Keitel figure and the journey of the
narrative can be broken down to between 8-10 acts, depending how you describe them. We discuss many of the
standard American how to write screenplay book authors such as Syd Field, while bringing a variety of authors
such as Lajos Egri (The Art of Dramatic Writing) who criticize both Aristotles Poetics and the way it has been
interpreted for centuries especially in Hollywood. We conclude that there is a middle ground as well, for while
Casablanca (1942) has a clear three act structure, it does not give us a happy romantic Hollywood
ending/resolution as Rick insists that Lisa leave with her husband.
Keywords: Aristotles Poetics, Hollywood, narrative structure, plot vs character

Introduction
Ask anyone what is the structure of so many Hollywood films over the years and the answer comes down
to the film needing a three act structure of beginning and middle and ending and with an ending that is a
resolution of the major conflicts presented. Add also that traditionally, Hollywood films have emphasized plot
(action) over character development as the main focus. But it is definitely helpful to realize that this so-called
Hollywood approach is actually closely derived from Aristotles definitions of story, structure and drama in
Poetics written several thousand years ago. That said, we need to be aware that many filmmakers have their
own approaches to narrative that differ quite widely from Aristotles viewpoint.
Men are better or worse, according to their moral bent; but they become happy or miserable according to their actual
deeds. (Aristotle, 1947, p. 24)

What do these two stories have in common?

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429

helping the US army defeat an indigenous blue skinned population on the planet Pandora for economic reasons.
But instead of carrying out his assigned mission, he falls in love with a blue skinned native young woman and
dedicates himself to driving the US army off of Pandora.
In our second story, a Greek filmmaker who has been away from Greece for decades returns and goes on a
search for the first film ever made in the Balkans, a journey taking him through Greece, Albania, the Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Rumania, Serbia, and Bosnia while the Bosnian war is taking place.
Both stories are feature filmsJames Camerons Avatar (2009) and Theo Angelopoulos Ulysses Gaze
(1995)and both depict characters dealing with wars taking place, but beyond that they belong to quite
different narrative traditions. Our point will be that Avatar is clearly a strong plot and special effects
driven Hollywood film that reflects basic rules of drama that were written up by Aristotle several thousand
years ago. And in contrast, while Theo Angelopoulos is certainly a Greek director, his films like many
independent and non-Hollywood movies, do not follow the so-called rules of drama found in Aristotles
writings.
Let us thus tune in to ancient Athens and modern Los Angeles and beyond! More specifically, any interest
in the intersection of Greece and Hollywood has to take into account the long and varied influence of Aristotle
on the art and craft of American screenwriting, in both a positive and negative sense, which has particularly
occurred since the beginning of the Sound Era when cinematic storytelling more strongly crossed paths with
theatrical playwriting.
Of course it is not likely that Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, D.W Griffith or even Frank Capra ever
opened Aristotles Poetics. But certainly for at least during the past fifty years or more as screenwriting has
become a taught course and craft with a multitude of How To Write a Screenplay books having appeared,
Aristotles conceptsor oversimplified versions of themhave had a profound influence.
To be specific, lets start with what Hollywood films, classical (1920s-50s) to contemporary 3-D digital
animation have offered cinema audiences around the world. As Kristin Thompson notes in her fine study, Story
Telling in the New Hollywood, The most basic principle of the Hollywood cinema is that a narrative should
consist of a chain of causes and effects that is easy for the spectator to follow (p. 10). And what does this have
to do with Aristotles influence? A lot! Simply put, as the much respected UCLA screenwriting Professor,
Hunter (1993) has noted in his text, Lew Hunters Screenriting 434:
Now is the time to begin talking about Aristotles two thousand-year-old beginning-middle-end structure. Aristotle
was the first to put the storytellers trade tricks down on paper. The beginning-middle-end concept is in Platos Republic,
but the elaboration of this insight you will find in Aristotles Poetics. (p. 20)

Hunter, with whom I am proud to say I have co-taught a screenwriting seminar in Greece, goes on to
insure Aristotles descendents will receive handsome royalties by saying:
For more demystification, buy this slim volume, read it twice, then pick it up every three or four years and read it
during your screenwriting career. Those are the few rules we have and need. (Hunter, 1993, p. 20)

We can be even more precise in how Aristotles Poetics has been simplified by Hollywood writers,
producers and Studio Chiefs, to emphasize (1) a three act structure (beginning, middle, and ending), (2) the
focusing on plot over character in terms of primary focus, and (3) the need for a final catharsis (resolution).
Avatar, like most of Hollywoods productions, certainly can be called by these formulas, Aristotelian. We
track a beginning (Act 1) while we get to see Jack Sully (Sam Worthington) trying to adjust to the US Armys

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mission on the planet Pandora to protect the minerals Earth needs to take from the planet. The middle (Act 2)
occurs as Jack meets and falls in love with a Pandoran native woman, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and gets to know
her Navi culture, and the ending (Act 3) becomes Jacks decision to fight with Neytiri and her people to
push the Americans out of Pandora, and love and war succeed at last for Jack and Neytiri and her people.
Theo Angelopoulos has a deep fascination with Greek history, myth, and culture in his films as I have
written about in The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. But while being a great admirer
of 50s Hollywood cinema, especially musicals, he has purposely taken his own approach to story, plot,
character, and resolution. In Ulysses Gaze, Harvey Keitel plays the Greek film director named A who is on
his journey to find the first film made in the Balkans. Yet instead of Aristotles and Hollywoods three acts, this
road movie or modern odyssey, can be broken down into 8-10 acts, depending on how you wish to identify
them. And even with flashbacks into As earlier life in Rumania, for instance, we, the viewers, are not offered
the clear plot points and development of character that Kristin Thompson comments strong Hollywood films
strive to offer.
Angelopoulos depiction of character is, in fact, in contradiction with over two thousand years of character
presentation and development in Western theater and literature. He is very interested how history and myth
cross paths with individual destinies often combining both in single shots, but we look in vain for a simple or
direct psychological character development. As I have written in my study of his films:
Hollywoods demand for strong character is actually in direct line with Aristotles call for clear motivation and
cause-and-effect depiction of inner struggle centered on given conflicts that must be faced and resolved. (Horton, 1997, p.
10)

The author have purposely chosen a Greek filmmaker here to suggest not everyone follows Aristotles
Poetics or Hollywoods basic formulas. But clearly in discussing Aristotle and cinema, we could mention many
independent American and also foreign filmmakers who take non-Aristotelian routes to story, character, and
endings that may remain open rather than resolved. I do wish to explore this territory as well, yet let us first
return to Aristotle and his Hollywood legacy.
Certainly one of the most influential screenwriting texts that reflect these Aristotelian concepts is Syd
Fields Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. As early on in the text as page 8 describes a script as not
only having three acts, but identifies that Act I is the beginning and should end on page 30, Act II is the
middle and should end on page 90, and Act III is the end and should finish by page 120 with a resolution
(thus a catharsis). Using Roman Polanskis Chinatown (1974), as an example, Field uses his paradigm to
explain that Act I ends when detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) must find out if Mrs Mulwray (Faye
Dunaway) is the real Mrs Mulwray who has hired him concerning her husbands affair and murder. Act II is the
conflict section, as Field (1982) explains:
The second act deals with Jack Nicholson coming into conflict with those forces who do not want him to find out who
is responsible for the murder of Mulwray. (p. 10)

Finally, Act III, Fields comments, for this film and every film, must lead to a strong ending in order to
make the film comprehensible and complete (p. 10). The days of ambiguous endings are over, he
concludes (p. 10) in the spirit of Aristophanes emphasis on catharsis, or a cleansing of powerful emotions
that have been pulled forth by the drama.

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Aristotle does clearly emphasize the importance of plot over character, a point that Hollywood over the
years has often carried out in exaggerated form so that we may often get almost no character development. In
the Poetics, Aristotle comments, The plot is the first consideration, and, as it were, the soul of the tragedy.
Character holds the second place (Egri, 1960, p. 92). And from Ancient Athens down to the latest Los Angeles
studio executive office, plot as the first consideration has certainly topped many Studio listsalong with
special effectsfor what kinds of films have been green lighted to be made.
Yet the dangers and limitations of Aristotles observations must be observed as well. Lajos Egri has also
strongly influenced those studying the writing of scripts in his 1946 work that covers stage drama primarily in
The Art of Dramatic Writing in which he notes, Aristotle denied the importance of character and his influence
persists today (p. xiv). Egri points out that Aristotles ranking of plot over character development has had a
negative effect on centuries of critics and writers since then to the degree that, ninety-nine percent of the
writings on this issue are confused and barely understandable (p. 93). He goes further in pointing out Aristotles
analysis of tragedies is in many ways based in a belief of Fate being in control. As Egri (1960) notes:
The Greek plays that have come down to us boast many extraordinary characters which disprove the Aristotelian
contention. If character were subsidiary to action, Agamemnon would not have died by the hand of Clytemnestra. (p. 97)

No one can dispute that there is much to be learned from Aristotles observations on the nature of poetry,
epic, and drama, especially tragedy, as put forth in The Poetics. And yet it is also fair to say that Aristotle
himself was not a poet or playwright and that many of his observations such as the importance of plot over
character or tragedy as more important than comedy, can be called into question in the same way that many of
the authors who have written How To Write a Screenplay books have never had scripts written, sold, and made
into films! Author John Truby (2007) puts this well in The Anatomy of Story when he comments:
Terms like rising action, climax, progressive complication, and dnouement, terms that go back as far as
Aristotle, are so broad and theoretical as to be almost meaningless. Lets be honest: they have no practical value for
storytellers. (p. 5)

Truby is helpful in suggesting how easy it is to miss the heart of good story telling, whether on stage or on
screen, when trying to overanalyze and at the same time oversimplify the nature of story telling itself.
Even Aristotle, I feel, cannot be categorized as only feeling plot rules over character, for as the opening
quote from The Poetics suggests, he understood that action comes from character. Thus modern authors
writing about storytelling and screenwriting who emphasize structure and plot over character, including
Chrtistopher Volger in The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, are actually misrepresenting both
Aristotle and lasting storytelling itself. Aristotle even comments in The Poetics that, the works of most of the
modern tragic poets, from the time of Euripides on, are lacking in the element of character (p. 24, italic
emphasis my own).
A danger for writers always throughout history has been trying to dictate or limit creativity and
storytelling to certain formulas when we are all aware that many great works dont follow such rules. French
director Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, put it well when he said, A film should have a beginning, middle, and
end, but not necessarily in that order (Horton, 1999, p. 95). And Kazakh filmmaker Rachid Nougmanov takes
on the whole notion of three acts as emphasized by Aristotle and contemporary Hollywood script book authors
like Syd Field, exploring how we could more precisely talk about five act structure in Chinatown and almost all
films (Horton, 2004, pp. 141-151).

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Nougmanovs conclusion is a valid one for all filmmakers and screenwriters in terms of how religiously
one must follow Aristotle or anyones rules of storytelling when he notes, And what if you want to make a
more personal, art house or avant-garde film? Still learn the rulesand then break them with knowledge
(Horton, 2004, p. 151).
Put simply, most Hollywood films over the years could quite easily fit Aristotles and authors such as
Syd Fields rules of three act structure with plot driven action and with a clear resolution (catharsis) in the
ending from The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Psycho and Lawrence of Arabia, down to Star Wars, E.T.,
Batman, Lord of the Rings, and Shrek 1-4. Yet it is clear that Aristotles and Hollywoods classical formulas
were not and are not the goals of filmmakers making films such as Andy Warhols Empire (1964), a single
shot of the Empire State Building from early evening till 3 am, Monty Pythons comic surrealism in The Life of
Brian (1979), or even a recent film such as Hollywood financed and produced Inception (2010), written
and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page. What if it were possible
for Aristotle to return and watch a film like Inception and then respond to it! In all fairness, I would like to
think instead of simply rejecting it for all the Aristotelian elements that are missing, perhaps he might
join film critic Roger Ebert in ironically enjoying Nolans labyrinthine narrative with comments similar to
Eberts:
Like the hero of the film, the viewer of INCEPTION is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure
what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning
of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you dont know that while you
are dreaming. And what if you are inside another mans dream? How does your dream time synch with us? What do you
really know? (Ebert, 2010)

In all fairness to Aristotle, in fact, we should agree with the popular screenwriting workshop teacher
Robert McKee that, much of the clarity Aristophanes offered in The Poetics including, dividing dramas
according to the value charge of their ending verses their story design (p. 79) has been lost as more and more
genres with unclear structures have appeared. McKee observes that Johann von Goethe listed seven genres or
types of dramatic structure, Johann von Schiller claimed there were more but couldnt name them (p. 79), and
Georges Polti listed 36 dramatic situations. And McKee himself goes on to list 25 genres, ranging from
Romance, Crime, Comedy and Western, to Maturation Plot, Disillusionment Plot, Education Plot and Punitive
Plot (pp. 80-86).
And as we move towards The End of this essay, what resolution or catharsis can we offer on Aristotle,
Hollywoods standard narratives and alternatives to both? I believe that Nougmanovs comments are helpful for
in many areas of life, its important to know the rules, laws, traditions, and then to feel free to use, bend, alter,
revise, or abandon them according to the spirit of the story and characters you wish to create. Even in a solidly
Hollywood production such as Michael Curtizs Casablanca (1942), the famous last line, Louis, I think this is
the beginning of a beautiful friendship, wasnt added until three weeks after the finishing of shooting the film.
Does the line change the catharsis of the film which is Rick (Humphrey Bogart) choosing not to fly away
with his true love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) as he takes the higher road in love by urging her to return to her
husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), an important resistance fighter against the Nazis? The technical answer
is no, no change in the resolution. But the tone of this last line opens up Ricks character even more to
suggest that beyond the pain of letting go of his true love Ilsa, he has the power of his own character to move
on with his own life.

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I would conclude by saying the screenwriting team of Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch,
building on the stage play of Everybody Comes to Ricks, thus ended the story with an alternative resolution
when audiences would have been expecting the Hollywood happy ending for a romance centered film.
Casablanca can therefore be called both a character-centered screenplay in that we remember the characters and
moments of them together more strongly than we remember a plot driven sense of story. And there is a
beginning, middle, and end, even though In the spirit that Godard mentions, Casablanca starts with Act II and
then goes to the beginning of the story as Ilsa walks in the door of Ricks caf and brings us into a flashback of
their beginnings before we return for the end of Act II and Act III. Moral of this tale? You can have your
Aristotle and your own creativity as well!

References
Aristotle (1947). Aristotle on the art of poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dorsch, T. S. (1978). Aristotle Horace Longinus: Classical literary criticism. New York: Penguin Books.
Ebert, R. (2010). Inception: Dreams on top of dreams inside dreams. Retrieved from http://www.Rogerebert.com
Egri, L. (1960). The art of dramatic writing. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Field, S. (1982). Screenplay: The foundations of screenwriting. New York: Dell.
Horton, A. (1997). The films of Theo Angelopoulos: A cinema of contemplation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Horton, A. (1999). Writing the character centered screenplay (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horton, A. (2004). Screenwriting for a global market. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hunter, L. (1993). Lew Hunters screenwriting 434. New York: Penguin Group.
McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting. New York: HarperCollins.
Seger, L. (1990). Creating unforgettable characters. New York: An Owl Book.
Thompson, K. (1999). Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Truby, J. (2007). The anatomy of story: 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller. New York: Faber and Faber.
Vogler, C. (2007). The writers journey: Mythic structure for writers. Studio City, CA: Michael Wise Productions.