An attempt is made here to synthesise ideas from theories of narrative and computer science in order to model high level semantic video content, especially for films. A notation is proposed for describing sequences of interrelated events and states in narratives. The investigation focuses on the idea of modelling video content as a sequence of states: sequences of characters' emotional states are considered as a case study. An existing method for extracting information about emotion in film is formalised and extended with a metric to compare the distribution of emotions in two films.