I’ll be interested to hear what you think if you find time to read the Wenders piece. I don’t think he’d deny that personal taste enters into his criticism.

To make your distinction requires addressing the contentious question of how to identify the “demands of form and genre.” Do box office receipts matter? If so, Wenders is in trouble. Critical discussion as an approach is more to my taste. :-) Obviously, my opinions are less grounded than authors’ or filmmakers’.

I like your distinction between plot and story. I think Wenders would agree. His complaint is that, in too many movies, what should be a story has been reduced to a sequence of events that might be exciting in themselves, but don’t arise in a satisfying way from the (neglected) place and characters.

There’s an old writing-teacher chestnut about the difference between plot and story: A plot is “the king died, then the queen died,” but a story is “the king died, then queen died of grief.” The distinction being the ongoing, unfolding, and (one hopes) compelling explication of the emotional/intellectual significance of the action.

Story is a way of ordering experience so that it “makes sense” — intellectual and emotional sense as well as “of the senses” sense. At its best, it’s not a short-circuiting of experience and impressions, but rather a refined and prolonged re-experiencing of them, often, but not always, crafted so that the experience and impressions can be shared with others. In a way, it is a form of abstraction in which the appealing details (humor, drama, perplexity) take prominence and the less appealing details fall away.

My apologies, btw, for being out of touch. I had a big, happy, self-imposed deadline looming (and met) and, in an unrelated incident, my computer had to go out to be de-virused, and — why not? — the bathroom ceiling fell in around the same time. I’m sneaking in some time at the work computer but will respond more thoughtfully to the MD comments as soon as I can.

If you want more of my story, a similar deer encounter was briefly described elsewhere. Here, I’m principally interested in how the image alone speaks to us. My deer was a recent example at hand, but much better story-telling/generating images for most people would be those of Larry Sultan you introduced us to in a previous post.