Check out this final piece, Overshadowed, incredible. Also see how the blog has been a detailed record of everything from inspirations, through documented creative challenges etc.
I really want you to get into the way of posting every day or other day. It's not enough to post screen shots, or music videos etc without commentary on how it's inspiring you, what you like about it etc. Think about your blogs from last year and the ways in which you could have done it better. Now's your chance to improve.
In media terms, narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.
The difference between Story & Narrative:
"Story is the irreducible substance of a story (A meets B, something happens, order returns), while narrative is the way the story is related (Once upon a time there was a princess...)" (Key Concepts in Communication - Fiske et al (1983))
Media Texts
Reality is difficult to understand, and we struggle to construct meaning out of our everyday experience. Media texts are better organised; we need to be able to engage with them without too much effort. We have expectations of form, a foreknowledge of how that text will be constructed. Media texts can also be fictional constructs, with elements of prediction and fulfilment which are not present in reality. Basic elements of a narrative, according to Aristotle:
"...the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents; for tragedy is a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness - and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. ...it is their characters indeed, that make men what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse." (Poetics - Aristotle(Penguin Edition) p39-40 4th century BC )
Successful stories require actions which change the lives of the characters in the story. They also contain some sort of resolution, where that change is registered, and which creates a new equilibrium for the characters involved. Remember that narratives are not just those we encounter in fiction. Even news stories, advertisements and documentaries also have a constructed narrative which must be interpreted.
Narrative Conventions
When unpacking a narrative in order to find its meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine the conventions of
Genre
Character
Form
Time
and use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. In particular, Time is something that we understand as a convention - narratives do not take place in real time but may telescope out (the slow motion shot which replays a winning goal) or in (an 80 year life can be condensed into a two hour biopic). Therefore we consider "the time of the thing told and the time of the telling." (Christian Metz Notes Towards A Phenomenology of Narrative).
It is only because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age, and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions. A narrative in its most basic sense is a series of events, but in order to construct meaning from the narrative those events must be linked somehow.
Barthes´ Codes
Roland Barthes describes a text as
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)
What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.
Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be ´open´ (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or ´closed´ (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).
Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:
There are many ways of breaking down narrative structure. You may hear a movie described as a "classic Hollywood narrative", meaning it has three acts. News stories have their own structure. A lot of work has been done by literary theorists to develop ways of deconstructing a narrative.
Tvzetan Todorov - suggests narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium
Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31 functions of character types)
Claude Levi-Strauss - constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.
Deconstructing Narratives
Separating Plot And Story
Think of a feature film, and jot down a) the strict chronological order in which events occur b) the order in which each of the main characters finds out about these events a) shows story, b) shows plot construction. Plot keeps audiences interested eg) in whether the children will discover Mrs Doubtfire is really their father, or shocks them, eg) the 'twist in the tale" at the end of The Sixth Sense. Identifying Narrator Who is telling this story is a vital question to be asked when analysing any media text. Stories may be related in the first or third person, POVs may change, but the narrator will always
reveal the events which make up the story
mediate those events for the audience
evaluate those events for the audience
The narrator also tends to POSITION the audience into a particular relationship with the characters on the screen.
Comprehending Time
Very few screen stories take place in real time. Whole lives can be dealt with in the 90 minutes of a feature film, an 8 month siege be encompassed within a 60 minute TV documentary. There are many conventions to denote time passing, from the time/date information typed up on each new scene ofThe X-Files to the aeroplane passing over a map of a continent in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other devices to manipulate time include
flashbacks
dream sequences
repetition
different characters' POV
flash forwards
real time interludes
pre-figuring of events that have not yet taken place
Locating the Narrative
Each story has a location. This may be physical and geographical (eg a war zone) or it may be mythic (eg the Wild West). Virtual locations are now a feature of many newsrooms (eg the computers and holograms of the BBC's Nine O'Clock News). There are sets of conventions to do with that location, often associated with genre and form (eg all space ships seem to look the same inside).
A good way to test your understanding of narrative is to apply the theories to a non-linear narrative such as the movieMemento (2002). You can find a study guide to Memento here.
Further Reading
This is a complex area of media theory and many of the websites available are written in language aimed at undergraduates or above. If you are feeling brave, try the following
Villains and Heroes - do news audiences construct their own narratives DESPITE the facts? A fascinating look at US coverage of the Chandra Levy story
News Forms - a look at the way news narratives are constructed from Transparency.com
NARRATIVE THEORY
Narrative theory studies the devices and conventions governing the organisation of a story (fictional or factual) into a sequence.
TZVETAN TODOROV (Bulgarian structuralist linguist publishing influential work on narrative from the 1960s onwards) Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction.
VLADIMIR PROPP (A Russiancritic who examined 100s of examples of folk tales to see if they shared. any structures. His book on this 'Morphology of the Folk Tale' was first published in 1928)Propp looked at 100s of folk tales and identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions.
The 8 character roles are
1. The villain(s)
2. The hero
3. The donor ‑ who provides an object with some magic property.
4. The helper who aids the hero.
5. The princess (the sought for person) ‑ reward for the hero and object of the villain's schemes.
6. Her father ‑ who rewards the hero.
7. The dispatcher ‑ who sends the hero on his way.
8. The false hero
The character roles and the functions identified by Propp can be applied to all kinds of narrative. In TV news programmes we are often presented with 'heroes' and ‘villains'. Just think of the media portrayal of Saddam Hussein or Princess Diana.
CLAUDE LEVI‑STRAUSS Levi‑Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be GOODand EVIL ‑ we understand the concept of GOODas being the opposite of EVIL. Levi ‑Strauss was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative:
Earth Space
Good Evil
Humans Aliens
Past Present
Normal Strange
Known Unknown
NARRATIVE ‑ TIME & SPACE
Narrative shapes material in terms of space and time ‑ it defines where things take place, when they take place, how quickly they take place. Narrative, especially that of film and TV, has an immense ability to manipulate our awareness of time and place e.g. flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.
NARRATIVE MODES There are two main modes of narrative which need to be structured.
1 . The narrative of events e.g. ‑ A hero shoots an enemy agent, dives into a lake,
triggers a remote control device which will destroy the enemy submarine.
2. The narrative of drama e.g. ‑ The heroine has a tense argument with the hero
and decides he was never her type and she is going to leave. Nothing has really
happened in terms of events but a lot has happened dramatically.
Using narrative to build suspense
Restricted narrative can be used to surprise an audience, e.g. when a character does not know what is waiting around the corner and neither does the audience. A degree of unrestricted narrative, the other 'half', can be used to effectively build suspense, as the audience are anticipating the events to come, of which the character has no knowledge. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There's a bomb beneath you and it's about to explode". In this first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.[Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster,1967), p.52]
USING NARRATIVE TO MAKE MEANING IN FILM
Whyis narrative important to us? Stories are very important in helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us. Bordwell and Thompson point out the different ways in which we are surrounded by the story form;
• As children we listen to fairy tales and myths. Reading material as we progress becomes short stories, novels, history and biographies.
• Religion is often presented through collection of stories/moral tales e.g. the Bible/ the Koran.
• Scientific breakthrough is often presented as stories of an experimenter's trial. Cultural phenomena such as plays, films, TV, dance, paintings tell stories. Newspapers tell stories, Dreams are little stories in themselves
Narrative in film
Most of the films we see at the cinema are narrative films, films that tell a story. Even films which are factual often employ story methods to get this point across, for instance a documentary may follow the 'story' of a group of environmental warriors over a period of six months in their fight to prevent a road being built. We are so steeped in the narrative tradition that we approach a film with certain expectations, whether we know anything about the story or not. For example: We expect The opening to give us information about who, what and where. There to be characters who interact with each other. To see a series of incidents, which are connected with each other. Problems and/or conflicts. The ending to resolve the action or cast new light on what has happened. As the viewer watches a film, they pick up cues, recall information, anticipate what will follow, and generally participate in the creation of the film's form. The film shapes the particular expectations by summoning up curiosity, suspense, and surprise. The viewer also develops specific hunches about the outcome of the action, and these may control our expectations right up to the end. The ending has the task of satisfying or cheating the expectations prompted by the film as a whole. The ending may also activate memory by cueing the spectator to review earlier events, possibly in a new light. As we examine the narrative form, we will consider at various points how it engages the viewer in a dynamic activity.
Cause and Effect
Narrative can be defined as "a chain of events in cause‑effect relationships occurring
in time and space". It typically begins with one situation, a series of changes occur according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally a new situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. Todorov's narrative theory is based on this; an equilibrium is set up which is then disrupted, causing disequilibrium, which is resolved into a new equilibrium by the end of the tale.
When we are watching a film we try to connect the events to make sense of what is happening, to see a line of cause and effect. This is by far the most important factor in narrative because even if there is no obvious connection, we still try to make one. This is a natural reaction because making connections is how we make sense of the world around us, for example looking for a reason for feeling sick and concluding that we ate an undercooked sausage. What we are actually doing in film terms is connecting the images that we see in both time and space and creating a causal effect between them.
How does the director manipulate cause and effect?
The director can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in a certain order, to build a picture in our minds. We automatically link what is happening in one shot with what happens in those either side of it, as this is what happens in real life. Thus, by showing us a window frame and then a shot of a house, we presume the house is what you see out of that window. In this way we are interacting with the film.
Some directors have exploited this idea to extremes. Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker in the 1920's experimented by showing people shots of an actor in between shots of different objects ‑ food, a dead woman and a child. The audience interpreted the actor's expressions (although it never changed!) as being hungry, sad and. affectionate. This is because our brains try to make continuitive sense of what we see. This placing together of images is called montage.
Sergei Eisenstein, another Russian filmmaker of the same era, believed that it was more effective if consecutive shots were not obviously linked as the audience were forced to think and interact more to make the mental jump from shot to shot. Montage can be used effectively in propaganda, where the filmmaker wants the audience to believe in a certain idea or concept. In a more light‑hearted way it is used today in pop videos and advertising, to encourage us to make associations and link ideas.
STORY vs PLOT
When we are linking images together in terms of cause and effect, one of the ways in which we do this is to look at what is happening on screen and assume that other events have taken place that we haven't actually seen. For instance, if we watch the opening to Gladiator, where a huge battle is about to take place we will assume that preparation for this battle has taken place, that the hero has proved himself to be a worthy leader in battle, that he has had a successful home life before this point. These events will have taken place in a different time and space to what we see on screen at present.
When discussing film narrative, we can make a distinction between the story and the plot (the plot is sometimes called the discourse)
a) The term plot is used to describe the events on screen and how they are organized/presented.
b) The term story is usedto describe the whole set of events in a narrative that we bring to the plot in order to make sense of it. This will include not only the plot elements, which we have seen, but also the events we have inferred, which we have assumed have happened.The story world is often referred to as the diegetic world of the film, the imaginary world that we enter into when we set out to watch the film. (Thus we refer to a film's diegesis.) We should note that the plot may also include non‑diegetic material that is part of the plot but not part of the story world. So, the plot may include music and voiceover elements for instance ‑ these are not part of the story world because we know they would not really happen in this created world we are seeing ‑ they are 'add‑ons'
TIME
Cause and effect take place in time. As we watch a film, we try to put events in chronological order and allow them duration and frequency.
a) Temporal Order
The plot does not always show us events in strict chronological order i.e. the order in which they would have happened in real life. For instance, sometimes a flashback technique is used to show us what happened in the past, or less frequently, a flash forward to events which have not yet occurred. The narrative can also be presented in parallel terms, for instance we watch a scene where a character is getting ready for a party, then we see another scene where a friend is doing the same. The time when this is happening is parallel to each other ‑ it is happening at the same time in real terms. As with all narrative choices the filmmaker has made, we must look at why s/he has chosen to present events in this fashion and the effect it has upon us as an audience.
b) Temporal Duration
There are 3 distinctions of time within a film:
Screen duration: the time the film takes to show
Plot duration: the length of time the plot covers
Story duration: the length of time the story covers (including all the inferred events we bring to it)
c) Temporal Frequency
The plot of a film may show us an event which happens once in the film but we know to have happened many times in the story ‑ a short‑cutting of information for the viewer. For instance, in a film such as Gladiator, we see the hero fight four battles before his final triumph. We assume that many more battles have actually taken place, but we are being shown the most important ones in whatever respect. Alternatively, but less frequently, a story event may be shown more than one time during the plot ‑ we see an event occur from another angle which may lead us to view characters or events in a different light.
SPACE
Space is important in a film because the location is usually quite important. The plot sometimes leads us to infer other story space, which we may never see e.g. we know a character has gone off on holiday but we do not see this 'space'.Screen space selects portions of plot space to show us, just as it selects certain time events and leaves others out. The decisions that are made in terms of film space need to be examined in conjunction with close study of the visual elements of film language.
Fabula and syuzhet (also sjuzhet, sujet, sjužet, or suzet (сюжет) ) are terms originating in Russian Formalism and employed in narratology that describe narrative construction. Syuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the retold events. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Shklovsky.[citation needed]
The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."[1] SinceAristotle(350 BCE, 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. For example: the film Citizen Kane starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his life through flashbacks interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flash-forwards. Therefore, the fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.
Narrative theory
NARRATIVE THEORY – (Some of) The basics…
NARRATIVE THEORY – ‘How do stories work?’
ARISTOTLE'S UNITIES - Perhaps the first 'narrative theory' as such. A narrative should be created within a 'unity' of time, place and action - that is, it should all take place in the same location, in real time, and with all action moving towards a logical (and moral) conclusion.
FREYTAG'S DRAMATIC STRUCTURE- Gustav Freytag was a 19th Century German dramatist and novelist who constructed his theory from the analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama. Freytag's dramatic arc is divided into five parts. (Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action & Denouement/Catastrophe/Resolution)
TODOROV’S THEORY – Todorov proposed a basic structure for all narratives. He stated that films and programmes begin with an equilibrium, a calm period. Then agents of disruption cause disequilibrium, a period of unsettlement and disquiet. This is then followed by a renewed state of peace and harmony for the protagonists and a new equilibrium brings the chaos to an end. The simplest form of narrative (sometimes referred to as ‘Classic’ or ‘Hollywood’ narrative).
PROPP’S THEORY –Vladimir Propp’s theory was formed in the early twentieth Century. He studies Russian fairytales and discovered that in stories there were always 8 types of characters evident. These are: the hero, the villain, the donor, the dispatcher, the false hero, the helper, the princess and her father. He did not state these characters were all separate people e.g. the provider could also be the helper. There are only 8 different character types and only 31 things they ever do. Once you have identified the character type (e.g., the hero) it’s easy to guess what they will do (save the maiden, defeat the villain, marry the maiden or whatever) because each character has a SPHERE OF ACTION. This is easily relatable to films and programmes today.
BARTHES’ ENIGMA CODE – The narrative will establish enigmas or mysteries as it goes along. Essentially, the narrative functions to establish and then solve these mysteries.
LEVI-STRAUSS’ BINARY OPPOSITION – Narrative tension is based on opposition or conflict. This can be as simple as two characters fighting, but more often functions at an ideological level – e.g., in Westerns, what do the cowboys and Indians each represent? What ideologies are embodied by the opposed sides in LOTR or Star Wars?
Remember, still images can have narratives also – refer to what John Ellis called the ‘narrative image’
Narrative Image
This is all about the marketing of a film. The narrative image is what we think of before we actually see the film. It is the film’s image or identity, and how it is branded. It comes from the direct publicity surrounding a film (ie its marketing – the poster, trailer, video release etc) and also from word of mouth. It particularly draws on the generic qualities of the film. In other words, the marketing promotes the film’s genre signifiers in order to exploit the audience’s desire for familiarity and recognition – this brands the film and broadens its potential appeal.
But the narrative image also centres around the idea of difference and originality. This comes in the form of the narrative enigma. The film’s publicity has to encourage the audience into asking questions about the film, and must intrigue the audience enough to want to know the answers. They will only be able to do this if they pay to go and see the film. This is the enigma – the mystery surrounding the film.
So the narrative image is a promise – a promise to the audience that the film will deliver the answers. Often the narrative image is deliberately misleading, in order to widen the target audience – the core audience are encouraged to go and see a film that conforms to expectations, but are shocked by unexpected breaks with convention that may have put them off if they had known about it beforehand.
In summary, narrative image combines similarity and difference and only works if this combination is finely tuned to target the audience effectively.
