However, "the film does thoroughly succeed in one important regard: offering a coherent, viewer-friendly account of the life of Jesus Christ.
Now that you've collected all the footage for your documentary, you need to organize it in an order that is interesting, coherent, and will keep the viewers' attention.
To investigate viewers' sensitivity to SFM cues, one can measure viewers' ability to detect a globally coherent figure walking within a mask of moving dots.
The TV series Lost may be the most extreme example: that was a hugely baroque exercise in casting the viewer as Tantalus, for whom a coherent and comprehensive explanation always eluded one's grasp.
There's no coherent narrative arc to all the information he throws at the viewer, and part of the time it feels like he's making it up on the spot.
Brooks taught Anderson and Wilson how to pull their "details" together into a coherent script, and how to anticipate the way a film will be perceived by viewers.
You could edit the stuff into something vaguely coherent, perhaps with an upbeat musical background that might stand a chance of keeping viewers awake.
But by presenting a hodgepodge of disparate issues rather than one coherent theme, the spot asks a lot of its 30 seconds, not to mention its viewers.
Although the show's title is more a convenience than a coherent theme, several of the 18 participating artists use materials or create forms that invite viewers to violate the "do not touch" rule.
More sophisticated viewers may find another problem, created by combining many pieces of art to make a coherent whole.
The first call it the J.J. Abrams school pulls viewers along from one mystery to another without bothering to solve the old ones in any coherent way.
