Glossary A. Foreign terms
Organized by language, roughly in order of first appearance in the source document. Diacritics preserved. Neither this glossary nor the source document claims to list every proper noun used on the site. Film titles and director names carry their own context in each preset's profile.
Japanese
Kishōtenketsu (起承転結)
Introduction, development, turn, conclusionA four-part narrative structure with no required antagonist.
Ten (転)
Turn, twistThird beat: a perceptual shift that reframes what came before (the one beat treated as mandatory in this project's framework).
Ketsu (結)
Conclusion, reconciliationFourth beat: closes the arc, often through acceptance rather than resolution.
Kyū (急)
Swift, compressed finishThird movement: acceleration, not necessarily fast on screen, but emotionally dense.
Chinese
起承轉合 (Qǐ Chéng Zhuǎn Hé)
Introduction, development, turn, unionThe historical ancestor of kishōtenketsu. Its final phase pushes toward synthesis rather than an open reframe.
Hé (合)
Reconciliation, synthesisThe closing phase: contrasting material is required to resolve into one coherent statement, stronger than the Japanese Ketsu or Vietnamese Hợp.
陰/陽 (Yīn/Yáng)
Shadow and light, invisible and visibleThe root of the Vietnamese Âm/Dương: parallel visible and invisible realms treated with equal narrative weight.
留白 (Liúbái)
The left-blankA painting and calligraphy principle: unmarked space as compositional content, not absence of content. Spatial rather than temporal (compare Ma) or informational (compare Mu).
隐性进程 (yǐnxìng jìnchéng)
Covert progressionA term from contemporary Chinese narratology (Shen Dan): a second, submerged narrative trajectory beneath a text's overt plot. A literary-critical framework, not a cinematic one. See Glossary B below.
Vietnamese
Khai-Thừa-Chuyển-Hợp
Introduction, development, turn, integrationThe Vietnamese adaptation of kishōtenketsu.
Chuyển
Perceptual turn, recontextualizationThe pivot this framework treats as mandatory: understanding of earlier material shifts without a new confrontation forcing it.
Hợp
Harmonic closureThe Vietnamese closing phase. Tolerates unresolved coexistence, unlike the stronger Chinese Hé.
Khoảng Lặng
Inhabited silenceThe Vietnamese inflection of what Ma and Mu together produce: silence dense with social, environmental, and historical presence.
Duyên
Resonance without causalityA meaningful connection between two elements that requires no causal chain.
Nhân Quả
Cause and effect (from Sanskrit karma via Buddhism)A cyclical or karmic narrative structure, in two registers: cosmological/karmic and structural/socioeconomic.
Xung Đột Gián Tiếp
Indirect conflictTension expressed through avoidance and ritual rather than direct confrontation.
Âm/Dương
Parallel visible and invisible realitiesThe Vietnamese use of the Chinese Yin/Yang pair as narrative architecture rather than metaphor.
Sân Trời
Light well, inner air shaftAn architectural feature of Vietnamese tube houses, used in the source document as a spatial model for Ma.
Hiên
Veranda, threshold spaceA space neither fully inside nor outside, also used as a spatial model for Ma.
Sát Khí
Killing air, sharp edgeOne of four registers of khoảng lặng: tense, cutting silence before or after rupture.
Cải lương
Reformed theaterA Southern Vietnamese theatrical tradition mixing folk music, classical opera, and spoken drama.
Vọng cổ
Nostalgia for the pastThe soaring arias within cải lương performance, described in the source document as an extended form of Ma.
Ca dao
Folk verseShort lyrical poems sung during fieldwork, cited as the earliest structural form of duyên.
Truyện Kiều
The Tale of KiềuNguyễn Du's verse epic, treated as a founding literary source for these frameworks.
Đổi Mới
RenovationVietnam's 1986 economic reform, used in the source document as a historical hinge, compared structurally to Ha.
Trầm
Depth of toneA low, charged vocal or musical register; a sound-based counterpart to khoảng lặng.
Mênh mang
Boundless longingA diffuse atmospheric feeling, commonly used to describe the emotional effect of Truyện Kiều.
Hơi thở
BreathBreathing rhythm, tied to the viewer's own body rather than to shot duration; compare Ma.
Khoảng không
Empty space, intersticeA pictorial ancestor of Ma rooted in Vietnamese literati painting.
Glossary B. Western academic terms
Terms from Western narratology and film theory, used elsewhere on this site (chiefly the Methodology page) without being defined in place. A reader outside film studies is unlikely to know them on sight.
Narratology
The formal study of narrative structure: how a story is built and told, independent of any one story's content.
Computational Narratology
The application of computational methods (NLP, knowledge graphs, among others) to narrative structures found in transcript, text, or audiovisual data: here, specifically the problem of representing structures built on duration, absence, or non-causal resonance (Ma, Mu, Duyên) inside tools originally built around causal-chain assumptions.
Fabula / syuzhet
A pair of terms from Russian Formalism (associated with Viktor Shklovsky), adopted by David Bordwell. Fabula is the story as it would have happened in chronological order; syuzhet is the order and manner in which the film or text actually presents that story. A flashback keeps the fabula intact while rearranging the syuzhet.
Diegesis / diegetic
The narrated world of a film: the events and characters that exist inside its fiction. A diegetic sound is one the characters themselves could hear (a radio playing in the scene); a non-diegetic sound is one only the audience hears (a film score).
Story / discourse distinction
Seymour Chatman's version of the fabula/syuzhet pair: "story" is the sequence of events, "discourse" is how that sequence gets narrated.
Analepsis
Gérard Genette's term (Narrative Discourse, 1972) for what English usually calls a flashback: a narration returns to an earlier point in the fabula after already having moved past it.
Satellite (Chatman)
A minor plot event that could be removed without breaking the causal chain of the main story, distinct from a "kernel," a major event the plot cannot do without.
Subtext (McKee)
Robert McKee's term for meaning implied beneath the literal content of dialogue: what a line is actually doing, as opposed to what it states.
The "gap" (McKee)
McKee's term for the space between what a character expects to happen and what actually happens as a result of their action: the engine that drives a scene forward, in his model.
Monomyth / Hero's Journey
Joseph Campbell's model (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949) of a single recurring narrative pattern he argued underlies myths across cultures: a call to adventure, trials, and a return with a reward. Christopher Vogler later adapted it for screenwriting practice.
Classical narrative (Bordwell)
David Bordwell's term (Narration in the Fiction Film, 1985) for the dominant mode of Hollywood storytelling: a tightly causal chain in which a goal-driven protagonist moves through escalating conflict toward resolution.
Covert progression
See 隐性进程 in Glossary A above, included here too because the scholarship citing it (Shen Dan) is contemporary and English-language, even though the term itself is Chinese in origin.
Cosine similarity
A mathematical measure of how similar two vectors are, regardless of their length, used in computational narratology to estimate how closely two vectors share symbolic or thematic content.
Narrative Knowledge Graph (NKG)
An architecture proposed in the source document: representing scenes as nodes in a network, connected by labeled edges, so that non-sequential relationships (like Duyên) can be tracked without relying on a language model to hold an entire film in memory at once.
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