QUOTES FROM FILM STRUCTURE: NARRATIVE AND NARRATION
1) Narrative is a way of organizing spatial and emporia data into a cause-effect chain of events with a beginning, middle and end that embodies a judgement about the nature of the events. - EDWARD BRANIGAN, NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION AND FILM, P.3.
2) The concept of 'narrative' refers to what happens or what is depicted in films (as well as novels), and 'narration' refers to how that narrative is presented to he film spectator (or reader of a novel). so 'narrative' refers to actions, events and characters, whereas 'narration' describes a mechanism that controls how the spectator gains information about those actions, events and characters.
3) A narrative does not consist of a random series of events, but a series of events related to one another in terms of cause and effect.
4)scenes as well as shots are also linked together by a cause-effect narrative logic.
5) One of the most fruitful ways to analyse cause-effect logic in narrative film is to image the scenes in a different order. For example, is psycho began with scene 3, a sense of mystery would be created, because we would not have sufficient information to understand marion's motives.
6) Not all shots and scenes in narrative films are linked by casual logic. we can imagine a shot of a man walking a dog followed by a close-up shot of the dog. If the shots are reversed, the meaning is still the same. since there is no casual logic linking these two shots.
7) It is common for most narrative films to contain moments of description. indeed the opening of PSYCHO contains several shots of the skyline of phoenix, arizona, which are descriptive because they simply aim to describe the space in which the narrative events are to unfold. however, the dominant structure that holds a narrative film together (including PSYCHO) is still casual logic.
8) For a film to appear coherent and meaningful, the relations between its actions and events need to be motivated. In narrative films, this motivation is supplied by the cause-effect logic.
9) Narrative development is dependant on the way in which the cause-effect logic is worked out in relation to the film's character (or characters), who motivates that cause-effect logic.
10) Narrative does not simply consist of a series of events linked together in a casual chain motivated by characters. Narratives are also structures into three stages: a beginning (Thornhill meeting his friends in the bar of the Plaza Hotel), a middle (mistaken for Kaplan leads to Thornhill's kidnapping and to his subsequent adventures) and an end (Thornhill's successful attempt to prove his innocence, expose Vandam and marry Eve).
11) Aa Todorov argues, narrative involves a transformation. in north by north west, it is primarily Thornhill who goes through a transformation. At the beginning of the film he is an unmarried advertising man planning to go to the theatre with his mother. But by the end of the film he is a married advertising man. this transformation is brought about by his temporary loss of identity (he is mistaken for a CIA agent and taken out of his everyday lifestyle by kidnappers). The middd part of the narrative has therefore caused Thornhill's transformation.
12) the middle part of the narrative as the narrative's liminal (or transitional) period, which means that it takes place outside of establishment (or 'normal') social events. The liminal period of a narrative therefore depicts transgressive events, events that exist outside of normal social events, whereas the initial and final equilibrium stages stages of the narrative represent social normality.
13) David Lynch's independently produced American film Blue Velvet (1986) parodies this three-fold narrative structure.
14) Psycho is notable for not conforming to this three-fold narrative structure because the main character, Marion, is killed a third of the way through the film. (She therefore goes through a radical transformation.) however, her act of stealing the money marks the beginning of the film's liminal period.
15) Most narratives are linear and chronological, because they present events in the order in which they happen. this applies equally to the two Hitchcock films discussed above - Psycho and North by Northwest. However, a film that, for instance, contains a flashback does not have a chronological narrative, because the narrative events are not presented in a linear order. By rearranging the narrative events in a non-linear order, flashbacks upset a film's cause-effect logic.
16) so far we have established that:
- a narrative is a series of events related to one another in terms of a cause-effect logic.
- the cause-effect narrative logic is motivated by the needs and wishes of characters.
- narratives are structures in terms of a beginning (the initial state of equilibrium), a middle (disruption of the equilibrium) and an end (restoration of equilibrium).
17) However, we do see a shot of the feet of the person leaving. this is an aural point of view shot. it would ave bee easy for the director to have shown the whole figure (we later we find out that it was stern wood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor; he was followed by Joe Brody in the second car). But if the film had revealed the identify of Owen Taylor (and Joe Brody), this would have violated the film's adherence to restricted narration.
18) TAXI DRIVER is based almost exclusively on restricted narration. this means the flow of narrative information is filtered through a single character. Travis Bickle acts as the film's dominant character, the narrative agent who determines the flow of narrative information to the spectator.
19) the almost obsessive attachment of the camera to Travis means that spectators gain a very limited perspective on the narrative world.
20) In other words, the camera ha attached itself to Travis's face, thus linking name and face in the same shot.
21) This process of looking for a dominant character is common to the opening of most narrative films, but the seeming randomness of this process was turned into art form by Hitchcock. In the opening of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, for example, the camera wanders through a busy rush-hour crowd before finally attaching itself to Roger Thornhill. And, in the opening of PSYCHO, the camera pans across the skyline of Phoenix and gradually moves towards a hotel; it seems to randomly pick one hotel room window, penetrate it and find its dominant character in the form of marion crane.
22) none of these shots provide additional narrative information about Travis; instead, their aim is indirect, to provide atmosphere, and to set the scene in which the film is to unfold.
23) The camera then pans left across the garage and stops at the entrance, by which time Travis has re-entered screen space, this time from the left. In other words, he has walked behind the camera.
24) The windscreen of Travis's taxi, the use of camera movement and placement, together with Travis's voice over, mark the narration as restricted. It could be argued that some scenes are not focused around Travis (in other words, that the film does rely on moment of omniscient narration after all).
25) However, in the shoot out, there are a few seconds of omniscient narration, as a man is seen coming out of Iris's room. The spectator sees him come out of the room and shoot Travis in the shoulder.
26) (remember that omniscient moments are those which lie outside Thornhill's span of awareness; sometimes it may be a single shot, sometimes an entire scene).
27) Their primary aim is to create suspense; they create suspense because the spectator knows more than Thornhill, and is anticipating how Thornhill will react to this situation.
28) a film based predominantly on omniscient narration presents the spectator with a wide breadth of narrative information. This is achieved by the narration shifting from one character to another, so that narrative information is conveyed to the spectator from many sources. This type of narration is commonly used in melodramas and television soap operas, in order to create a discrepancy in knowledge between the spectator and characters.
29) The purpose of systematically employing omniscient narration in melodrama and television soap operas is to create a plethora of dramatic scenes where characters find out the spectator already knows.
30) The scenes in the hospital and in the care (as well as many subsequent scenes in the film) are based on omniscient narration.
31) SUMMARY
- Narration refers to a mechanism that determines how narrative information is conveyed to the film spectator.
- there are two dominant modes of the film narration - omniscient and restricted narration.
- restricted narration conveys the narrative to the spectator via one particular character (thus aligning the spectator to that character), leading to a sense of mystery.
- Omniscient narration shifts from one character to another, conveying narrative information to the spectator from many sources. This creates a discrepancy in knowledge between the spectator and characters, for the spectator knows more narrative information than any one character, creating scenes of dramatic suspense.
32) One of the dominant characteristics of PULP FICTION in terms of narrative is the non-linear ordering of its events. ... in the way it radically alters the sequence in which the events are presented.
33) Furthermore, there is a systematic structure to the film's non-linearity. the film begins with events in segment 4; it jumps back to segment 2; jumps forward again to 5; it then jumps right back to segment 2; jumps forward again to 5; it then jumps right back to 1 before jumping to the end, events in 6. Finally, it jumps back to events in segment 2, picks up where it left off and then progresses chronologically to segment 4, where it began.
34) The film's chronology therefore begins and ends with events that take place in the middle (segment 4). It then jumps backwards and forwards, in wider and wider arcs until it returns to 2 and moves along to the events it began with.
35) I hope to have shown that concentrating on the chronology an cause-and-effect logic of PULP FICTION, we can begin to understand that films do not need to present the cause-and-effect logic of a film in chronological order.
36) *from the beginning*
the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov also describes narratives in terms of three stages:
- a state of equilibrium
- the disruption of this equilibrium by an event
- the successful attempt to restore the equilibrium.
NARRATIVES- THE MEDIA STUDENTS BOOK - GILL BRANSTAN
1) A good definition of narrative for these purposes (which applies to both fiction and non-fiction forms) is given by Branigan, who argues it is 'a way of organising spatial and temporal data into a cause-effect chain of events with a beginning, a middle and end that embodies a judgement about the nature of events' (1992: 3; original italics).
2)Barthes suggested that narrative works with five different codes which activate the reader to make sense of it. This is an indicate theory, using deliberately unfamiliar terms, and Barthes is not at pains to make it accessible. We have opened it out a little to apply it to CSE: miami in the case study. Particularly interesting is his suggestion that an 'enigma code' works to keep setting up little puzzles to be solved (and not only at the beginning of the story), to delay the story's ending pleasurably: e.g. how will Tom Cruise get out of this predicament? What is in the locked room? How does x really feel about y?
3)An action code will be read by means of accumulated details (looks, significant words) which invoke (and reinforce) our knowledge of what are often highly conventional 'scripts' of such actions as 'falling in love' or 'being tempted into a robbery'.
4)such structuralist approaches have been applied not just to individual fictions but also to non-fiction forms such as major news stories, to see whether narrative drives 'set-up' certain expectations and puzzles, look for (and in fact construct) tidy 'beginnings' and 'endings', etc. The widespread process can mean that complex historical and political explanations are structured out of the storytelling.
5)Important events such as wars finish. But narratives don't just come to a halt- they end, in a way which 'rounds things off', assigns blame and praise, etc. (the new equilibrium).
6)So deep are the satisfactions of 'the ending' that newsrooms will try hard to find signifiers which suggest a return to normality - very like the 'and so they all lived happily ever after' of the fairytale.
7) The term narration describes how stories are told, how their material is selected and arranged in order to achieve particular effects with their audiences.
8) Bordwell and Thompson (2004) take Russian formalist theory but use the sometimes confusing English terms. They define story as consisting of 'all the events in a narrative, both explicitly presented and inferred'. The plot, on the other hand, is everything visibly and audibly present in the film before us; in other words those highly selected parts of the story which the narrative puts before us'.
9) Characters 'work' on the basis of appearance, clothing, gestures, star image , etc.
10) Corrigan and White point out how, although movies aim to create broadly realistic characters, most of them are a blend of ordinary and extraordinary features (rather like stars). This makes for characters that are 'recognisable in terms of our experiences and exceptional in ways that make us interested in them....Even{with}...characters {like} the ... heroine of alien (1979) understanding them means appreciating how that balance between the ordinary and extraordinary is achieved' (2004:224).
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlineessays/JC29folder/MusicVideo.html
MUSIC VIDEO: MESSAGES AND STRUCTURES
by Deborah H. Holdstein
1) Moreover, this 'sense of performance' distinguishes the more successful music videos from others - in terms of composition, lighting, mis-en-scene, and the need to use or reject the song's narrative as the foundation for the film's visual backdrop.
2)Most important, however, artists with any amount of creative control over the content and 'look' of their videos become responsible for helping to create a video artwork instead of a mere taped performance. They also can create their own screen persona - a powerful, influential presence with genre-specific and political implications.(2)
3) divide into two categories: those with allegedly explicit 'political' themes, and those which revive the traditional U.S film musical and represent its newest incarnation. Many others fall into still another category: the fantasy video, based entirely or in part on the spirit and lyrics of the song being performed.
4) in fact many groups' videos capitalize quite blatantly on the stereotypes and situations of old and new hollywood at its worst - exotic women savages, surrealism without Bunuel's creative saviour faire, and endless variation on computer, STAR WARS, and knight sagas and medieval times.(4)
5) 1. the star as fantasy 'seer' or prophet;
2. the star as political commentator or narrator;
3. the star as mediator and point of resolution for social conflict.
6) The mediator, in several rock videos, has become a surreal, 'fantasy' figure, involved yet detached from the action s/he seems to resolve. And interestingly,even those videos we can call "political" find their star(s) strangely removed from what appears to be the purpose o the visual text, undercutting whatever political message it might have had to offer.(5)
7) Michael jackson's video to his hit song, 'Beat it', provides an excellent example of homage featuring a fantasy seer/mediator/star. The words of the song, while sympathetic with the visual imagery, are secondary to the storytelling visuals of the video. It doesn't need words, really. It has faces, gestures, emphasis, and a narrative one could easily follow without 'Beat it' on the soundtrack.
8) As entertainment, 'Beat it' is fascinating, beautifully edited, lit, composed, and choreographed.
9) His involvement contrasts to the Donna Summer video, where the star seems strangely detached from the subject matter her narrative seems to support.
10) However, as more and more music videos borrow their formats from Hollywood films, as ore pretend to be 'mere entertainment' while featuring the personality, appearance, and sexuality of one performer, observers of this 'new' form of entertainment are rewarded with new political frontiers on which to practice their skills as careful viewers.
11) 5. It is also important to note that the videos' pace and editing are strikingly like that of TV commercials. And the purpose is also the same: the selling of both product and image, in this case, the 'star'.
