Composite film

A composite film is a feature film whose screenplay is composed of two or more distinct stories. More generally, composite structure refers to an aesthetic principle in which the narrative structure relies on contiguity and linking rather than linearity. In a composite text or film, individual pieces are complete within themselves, yet they form a whole work that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

The history of composite films begins with composite novels. The composite novel is a literary work composed of shorter texts that—though individually complete and autonomous—are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles.

Although the composite-text aesthetic can be traced back through framework-stories (such as the One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales), story cycles (such as the Arthurian stories), and sacred composites (such as the Bible), composite texts had specific precursors in the village sketch of nineteenth century Europe and America. Reflecting its roots in the framework-story and/or the cycle, a typical village sketch may feature an introductory story and a summary story, with individually titled internal stories that do not necessarily depend upon specific sequencing.

Twentieth century experimentation with the composite whole-text aesthetic, i.e., combining individual short stories into a whole-text narrative, began with James Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and accelerated thereafter, but the composite novel remained controversial among readers, reviewers, and critics. Some wanted to call these works "novels" while others wanted to call them "collections". To their authors, however, these works were clearly not just collections of stories. Joyce insisted that Dubliners was a planned, integrated whole text. William Faulkner fought both publishers and critics over the whole-text coherence of Go Down, Moses, refusing to append "And Other Stories" to the book's title. Later, Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien would wage similar battles over The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts (1976) and The Things They Carried (1990), respectively. By the end of the twentieth century, authors were announcing their whole-text intentions by insisting on such sub-titles as "A Novel in Stories", or simply "A Novel".

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