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, the author 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 literacy play a fundamental role in shaping visual storytelling, Nayar challenges the ways 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, the author demonstrates, are in fact significantly impacted by ways of knowing that have—or, in some cases, that have not—emerged as a consequence of a cultural investment in reading, writing, and print. Between close readings of 1950s-1960s Bollywood cinema and modernist art cinema, as well as of many cinemas in between, this book casts a pioneering lens on what goes into shaping screen stories worldwide. It is a theoretical work certain to alter our understanding and future exploration of the narrative-film species.