Retrospectively, the missing parts will be added by your everyday knowledge, which is also involved in the understanding of scenes. Every scene has its beginning and its end, while the audience does not get to see every part of these elements in the film but has to deduce it by itself; it depends on its knowledge of everyday life in doing so. Film scenes and sequences facilitate the perceptional adaptation to this and, thus, are remembered more precisely than the whole film.

The next person interested in the division of scenes and sequences is the screenwriter himself, at least if he does not stick to the scene-by-scene approach but makes himself a detailed structural scheme of every sequence and scene. This way, he can easily write on an easier scene when he lacks the concentration for a more complicated one. A well-structured script helps the writer to understand and, as a consequence, sell his ideas. It provides him with orientation all over the way.

Next to the writer stands the director with his crew. They all have to communicate about the script in order to coordinate their actions. Well-structured scenes and sequences are not only the base for understanding and realizing the script but as well for drawing up a work plan. Writing a script, the writer gives guidelines to communicate his ideas.

The last pragmatically functional structure of scenes and sequences is, indeed, best understood in a rather scientific way. As Wittgenstein states, every utterance gets its sense through its context, and so do scenes and sequences. Imagine Memento being told in the chronological order of its actions, starting with the beginning of Leonard’s amnesia. Even a newspaper article that begins with the course of the story, not with the ‘plot’, would be more interesting to receive.

Scenes and sequences are the basic semantic moments of a script. In the same manner that the utterance ‘I am cold’ can be understood as a demanding ‘close the window’, depending on the nonverbal and extra communicational contexts it is placed in, scenes get their signification from other scenes and the sequences they are organized to. And even a scene’s elements can come to change the meaning of the whole scene by interchanging their positions. To visualize that, try out interchanging the words of the following simple sentence and look for a change of meaning:

Bill kills Amy.

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