"First published by Hampton Press, Inc. in 2010. This edition published in 2014..."--Title page verso.

Most people think of film narrative in fundamentally visual terms. But what if visuality is only one component of a larger epistemic framework for how film narrative works? In this book, Sheila J. Nayar argues just that, laying out the comprehensive terrain for what has already been described as a controversial new theory of cinematic literacy.

Proposing that orality and alphabetic literacy play a fundamental role in shaping visual storytelling, Nayar challenges the way we think about how film stories get shaped, as well as the notion of film as an autonomous mode of storytelling construction. Narrative and aesthetic principles of film, she demonstrates, are significantly impacted by ways of knowing that haveor, in some cases, that have notemerged as a consequence of a cultural investment in reading, writing and print.

Between close readings of Bollywood cinema and modernist art cinema in 1950s1990s, as well as of the many cinemas in between-including Indian middle cinema and middle-class cinema - Cinematically Speaking casts a pioneering lens on what goes into shaping screen stories