This dissertation examines how digital technology has influenced the evolution of narrative in contemporary French cinema since 2000. It presents three narrative formats: the compact narrative viewed straight through, the series/serial narrative organized across multiple viewing sessions, and the infinite narrative requiring constant engagement and integration into everyday life. These are analyzed based on their continuity, closure, and linearity. Digital technology is shown to popularize loss of linearity and enhance interactivity, opening cinema narrative into more complex spaces to improve immersion for viewers.

1. MSc Film Studies B084570
The influence of digital technology on the narrative in
contemporary French cinema
Abstract
This dissertation studies the notion of narrative in the post-2000 French cinema and how the
development of digital technology influenced its evolution. The theories and ideas proposed here
are illustrated with examples taken from the contemporary French society.
Here we present three narrative formats. The compact narrative, made to be watched straight from
start to end. The series and serial narrative, organised around several watching sessions more or less
connected depending on if we have rather a series or a serial. And the infinite narrative, which
requires a permanent engagement from its audience and tends to integrate our everyday life.
These three formats are analysed and compared through three structural characteristics. These are
the continuity, which expresses the cohesion and the unity of the story, the closure, which represents
the limits of the story in time and space, and the linearity, which expresses the universality of
cinema. That is to say, the idea that anyone watching the same story will always see exactly the
same film, whenever and wherever they watch it.
From the narrative formats and the structural characteristics I define the evolution of film narrative
around tendencies as well as I explain how digital technology influences this evolution. Such
technology is popularising the loss of linearity in narrative by enhancing interaction between
spectators and stories. Furthermore, cinema narrative is looking for some opening and integration
in wider and more complex spaces. All of this aims to enhance the viewers’ immersive experience
into a reinvented world.
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