ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a theory about “narrative knowledge”. Who knows what? When? Where? How? It describes in detail what point of view is and how to work with it within the screenplay’s structure. Screenplays are “manipulative” documents in the sense that they try to forecast, but also control the future reactions of viewers while deciding what will or will not be revealed to them based upon what is said, shown and told. The point of view is, according to Gérard Genette: “a located focus […] a sort of information bottleneck that only lets through what the situation allows” (1983, p. 49, our translation).
It is at the screenwriting stage that one develops and decides how the plot will be revealed to the viewers. We will show that there are many possible combinations between what we disclose to viewers but not to various characters, or what we choose not to tell viewers in order to prolong the suspense. We refer to the play between what is said, shown, known and heard as our “point-of-view configurations” and we have created a chart of possible point-of-view configurations for the writers and readers of screenplays to discover and use.
