narrative strategies in film

Griem & Voigts-Virchow 2002: 162; Steinke 2007: 64): “camera,” “camera eye,” “invisible observer” (cf. Whereas continuity editing presupposes a holistic unity in a world which is temporarily in conflict but finally homogenized, Ėjzenštejn’s collision editing accentuates stark formal and perceptual contrasts to create new meanings or unusual metaphorical links (Grodal 2005: 171). Dolby Surround) negate the directional coherence of screen and sound source, thus leading to tension between the aural and the visual. Although it has been defined as “a concrete perceptual fact linked to the camera position” (Grodal 2005: 168), its actual functions in narrative can be far more flexible and multifarious than this definition suggests. The result, initiated by David Wark Griffith in particular, was an “institutional mode of representation,” also known as “classical narration” (Schweinitz 1999: 74), “continuity editing” or “découpage classique.” The filmic discourse was to create a coherence of vision without any jerks in time or space or other dissonant and disruptive elements in the process of viewing. The “real” of the cinema is founded at least as much on the real-image quality of its photography as it is on the system of representation that shows analogies to the viewer’s capacity to combine visual impressions with a “story.” The reason for the latter is that by watching films the spectator becomes more and more used to conventions of classical narration and genre-stereotypes. For instance, we can find the phenomenon of metalepsis in films like McTiernan’s Last Action Hero (1993), where a character of the diegetic storyworld happens to get into a metadiegetic action film and returns back to diegetic reality accompanied by the action hero of this film-within-a-film, or in Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998), where characters of a contemporary diegetic world get lost in a metadiegetic black-and-white TV series of the 1950s. Anti-Narrative strategies. A rhetorical film doesn’t have to include a narrative component, but it may well do so. However, there can be various types of fictional contracts with the audience that transcend the postulate of narrative verisimilitude, allowing even a dead person to tell his story as a “character narrator” (Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, 1950; Mendes’ American Beauty, 1999), or when a film is built around a puzzle, putting into question any form of reliable narration (a summary of “unreliable situations” in cinema is given in Liptay & Wolf eds. Raised in a family of designers and artists, this pair of siblings each tells stories in a variety of ways. Coherent actions and events are often, but not always, separated into different shots, as in shot-reverse-shot sequences to represent a conversation or in cross-cutting sequences to represent a car chase (see § 3.1.5), although there is no necessity to do so. (c) Film is not bound to cinema, at least since TV became popular enough to reach a mass audience. Narratologists of a strongly persistent stance regret that connotations of visuality are dominant even in terms like point of view (Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View) and focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization), and they maintain that the greatest divide between verbal and visual strategies is in literature, not in film (Brütsch 2011). Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. ); “‘camera’” in a metaphoric sense (Schlickers 1997); “film narrator” (Lothe 2000: 27 ff. It has thus long been a rule that the speed and the sequentiality of a film’s projection is mechanically fixed so that the viewer has no possibility of interrupting the “reading” to “leaf” back and forth through the scenes or of studying the composition of a single shot for longer than the actual running time. In each of these films, there is an ever-widening gap between story and discourse. Creative forms of representations of subjectivity that nowadays appear in the micro-structure of movies like Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) or in the macro-structure of movies like Nolan’s Inception (2010) can be compared with examples throughout film history: in Murnau’s classic Der letzte Mann (1924) one can trace specific forms of representing dreams and hallucinations due to heavy use of alcohol; memory and dream sequences are as typical of Bergman’s Smultronstället (1957) as hallucinatory sequences of Liebeneiner’s Liebe 47 (1949) or ambivalent delusions of Polanski’s Le locataire (1976). (a) Film portrays a story unfolding in time according to the possibilities and constraints of the medium. Burgoyne, Robert (1990). Consistently, due to the hybrid and multimodal nature of film, an approach that examines narrative in film is per se more complex than a theory of literary narration (9). Ordinary World; Disruption; Act 2. What are narrative conventions? One of the most famous and effective use of a documentary strategies for a narrative film was the Blair Witch Project in 1999. . As I will point out, the use of modern anti-narrative strategies makes it rather impossible to get one coherent meaning out of this movie and out of other movies. “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Impersonal Narration.”. The living handbook of narratology invites you to become actively involved in further developing and enhancing our handbook – you can do so by discussing existing entries and making suggestions as to how they might be enhanced, or by pointing out emerging fields of narratological interest that might warrant a new entry in our handbook. pictures that provide erroneous information about the storyworld) by using forms of irritating, ambivalent or misleading editing or different types of underreporting. Modern cinema also made possible the flash-forward as the cinematographic equivalent of the prolepsis (Losey’s The Go-Between, 1970); it used jump cuts (Godard’s À bout de souffle, 1960) and non-linear collage, blurred the borders between “objective” diegetic reality and subjective perception (Polanski’s Le locataire, 1976) or reality and dream (Dead of Night, 1945, diverse directors), broke with the narrative convention of character continuity, as when a central protagonist disappears in the course of events (Antonioni’s L’Avventura, 1960) or used ironic forms of interplay of verbal and audiovisual narration (Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, 1962). A diachronic approach should discuss current forms of filmic narrative against the background of the historical developments of film narration, inseparably interwoven with the achievements and capacities of the medium (cf. “Internal editing,” as advocated by André Bazin, avoids visible cuts and creates deep focus (depth of field), making foreground, middle ground and background equally sharp and thus establishing continuity in the very same take, as is the case in the work of Orson Welles (e.g. Narrative Strategies is a strategic communications firm solving today’s most demanding reputational and public affairs challenges. Furthermore, the situational, narrative and multimodal contexts in film are usually relatively clear. This view, however, ignores the impact of editing, non-diegetic sound and aspects of the mise en scène to the act of audiovisual narration (cf. They disrupt the narrative continuum and convert the principle of succession into one of simultaneity by means of iteration, frequency (Kurosawa’s Rashômon, 1950, repeating the same event from different angles) and dislocation of the traditional modes of temporal and spatial representation (Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961). Every extradiegetic verbal narrativeinstance can be either heterodiegetic or homodiegetic in its relation to the diegetic world. § 3.3.1), make the viewer painfully aware of the impersonal and subjectless apparatus of the camera which alienates them from the character rather than drawing them into his ways of seeing and feeling. Meister (ed.). Yet there are many more focusing strategies which select and control our perception as well as our emotional involvement such as deep-focus, the length and scale of a shot, specific lighting, etc. Even a film that tries to make an argument is likely to include some passages involving agents and actions, goals and obstacles. The journey or quest. Furthermore, approaches that concentrate overwhelmingly on questions of mediality should match their results with general narrative theories. THIS BOOK IS DESIGNED TO PROVIDE ACCURATE AND AUTHORITATIVE INFORMATION IN REGARD TO THE SUBJECT MATTER COVERED. The question of focalization in film becomes even more sophisticated in the case of voice-over narration, as there is the possibility of different forms of interaction and/or tension between verbal and audiovisual narration. Narrative form is the structure though which movies tell stories. Language, noises, electronic sounds and music, whether diegetic or (like most musical compositions) non-diegetic, help not only to define the tonality, volume, tempo and texture of successive situations but also to orchestrate and manipulate emotions and heighten the suggestive expressivity of the story. Abstract — COCO. The narratological inventory, when applied to cinema, is bound to incorporate and combine a large number of “co-creative” techniques “constructing the storyworld for specific effects” (Bordwell 1985: 12) and creating an overall meaning only in their totality. The relation can be alternating and ironical, as in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), or ambivalent, as in Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961). Consider your story mountain and use this model to map out the dramatic questions, answers and actions which define the acts in your chosen Pixar movies. Because stories are all around us (in life, literature, other films) we will approach a narrative film with a great many existing expectations. The few experimental films that construct events “through the eyes” of the main character (e.g. The problems we have in describing the story of the film also foreshadow the problems we will have in analysing the movie itself. However much meaning can be attributed to the visual track of the film, it would be wrong to state that it is “narrated visually” and little else. The two approaches depend on which scholarly perspective is preferred: either how far narrative principles can be limited to questions of narrativity alone, or whether the affordabilities of the medium have conclusive consequences for its narrative capacities. the literal viewpoint as realized in “eye-line matches”) or whether it observes “from outside” in the sense of narrative mediation. Tolton, C. D. E. (1984). Narrativity, spectator engagement and inventive techniques of presentation combine to produce a “filmic discourse” which a synchronic formal analysis of narrative strategies can grasp only up to a certain point. Quite often the difference from one shot to another is the only indication of a change of state. This explains why any approach that takes the camera as narrator—as in the so called invisible-observer models—is as one-sided as the opposite position that overestimates the role of montage or editing in the act of audiovisual narration. Therefore, in almost every narratological model of focalization and narrative perspective, the camera perspective (in a technical sense) is not understood as the only factor for determining focalization and/or  narrative perspective (focalization/narrative perspective ≠ camera perspective). . Given these and (many) other examples, hypotheses on narrative “trends” in recent cinema and TV should be modified with regard to historical development. A “seamless” and consecutive style serves to hide “all marks of artifice” (Chatman 1990: 154) and to give the narrative the appearance of a natural observing position. They further hold that narratological categories in film and literary studies differ much less than most scholars would suggest. Apply this in reverse to the story that you have chosen and explain the basic structure of that narrative. This extends to more complex chains of events. All of these assaults on traditional narration nevertheless “depend upon narrativity” (or our assumptions about it) and “could not function without it” (Scholes 1985: 396). Thus the very question “Who sees?” involves a categorization of different forms of POV that organize and orient the narrative from a visual and spatial standpoint and that also include cognitive processes based on a number of presuppositions about a proper perspective, not to speak of auditory information. However, nowadays one can also find forms of unreliable narration that contain “lying pictures” such as those used by Hitchcock in Stage Fright but that are embedded in more complex narrative structures, such as the multi-level flashback structure of The Usual Suspects that creates a tension between what Kuhn (2011) calls intradiegetic, homodiegetic verbal and extradiegetic, heterodiegetic visual narration. These kinds of structures have forerunners in film history: as early as 1924, in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., the main character, a film projectionist, “dreams himself into” the movie he projects. Christopher Nolan’s Inception uses a unique blend of narrative strategies to tell a genre-bending and involving story. Further expectations will be aroused as we actively participate in creation of the film’s form: the ending has the task of satisfying or cheating the expectations prompted by the film as a whole. While the image can be fixed, sound comes into existence from the moment it is perceived. As Branigan states, point of view can best be understood as organizing meaning through a combination of various levels of narration which are defined by a “dialectical site of seeing and seen” or, more specifically, the “mediator and the object of our gaze” (1984: 47). Despite the fact that adapting literary texts into movies has long since become a conventional practice, the variability of cinematographic modes of narrative expression calls for such a number of subcategories that the principle of generalization (inherent in any valid theory) becomes jeopardized. One basic rule consists in never letting the camera cross the line of action (180-degree rule), thus respecting geometrical orientation within a given space. It was with the introduction of video and DVD that the viewer could control speed variations, play the film backwards, view it frame by frame and freeze it and (as in DVD and Blu-ray) use the digitalized space of navigation to interact, select menus and “construct” a new film with deleted scenes, an unused score and alternative endings (cf. Unlike drama, however, a film is not produced in quasi-lifelike corporal circumstances; rather, its sequences are bound together in a technically unique process (“post-production”) to conform to a very specific perceptual and cognitive comprehension of the world (Grodal 2005: 169). Irritating effects can be achieved when the interplay of voice and vision is used in an unconventional way, as when in a long narrative passage in mainstream cinema the words of an (extra- or intradiegetic) voice are not supported by images at all. Schlickers speaks in this respect of a “double perspectivation” (2009). Distelmeyer 2012). Edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Theo Damsteegt. Panofsky describes the result as “a speeding up of space” and a “spatialization of time” ([1937] 1993: 22). To create an automatic citation reference for a paragraph, select the relevant passage in the article with your mouse, then copy and paste the reference from this text box: © Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg. Films and audiovisual artifacts such as Fassbin­der’s epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) are characterized by a complex interplay of different audiovisual and verbal narratives or, in terms of a communication model, by an interplay of different narrative instances or agents. To illustrate the interplay of verbal narration and visual images in film, Kozloff (1988: 103) suggests “a continuous graph” com­prising three areas: “disparate,” “complementary,” “overlapping.” She does not introduce either binary or clearly delimited categories, speaks rather of the “degree of correspondence between narration and images”—a reasonable proposal because distinct boundaries cannot be drawn. Accompanying the proliferation of user-generated content, numerous creative audiovisual micro-narratives have been published (e.g. The film was obviously low-budget, as it was taken from a single, hand-held camera by supposed students embarking on a quest to record "the truth about the blair witch." § 3.2.2). Narration in film possesses as its two main components current aesthetic concepts and, inseparably interwoven with these concepts, the technical means available at the time of production. “[I]n their succession and fusion they [images] permit the appearance of temporally extended events in their total concrete development” (Ingarden [1931] 1973: 324). Stories could develop more complex characterization, thematic concerns, and temporal development, along with increasing devices for the narrator to manipulate and present those events. Continuity editing aims primarily at facilitating orientation during transitions in time and space. Both media, narrative literature and film, have a “double chronology” or “double temporal logic,” i.e. Your email address will not be published. Camera parameters as well as parameters of the montage mediate the narrative events and the mise en scène. New technologies such as multi-track sound with high digital resolution (e.g. The verbal narrative is not automatically superior to the visual narrative or vice versa. Citizen Kane, 1941). Since the mid-1990s an increasing number of popular mainstream films have made use of several special devices of audiovisual narration in order to achieve dense and complex narratives and/or create suspense through narrative discourse rather than through their storylines: the conventions of classical filmic narration are subverted and/or become the subject of a self- and media-reflexive game through the use of multiple narrative levels (Amenábar’s Abre los ojos, 1997; Jonze’s Adaptation, 2002), different forms of narrative unreliability (Singer’s The Usual Suspects, 1995), sudden final twists (Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, 1999), creative use of genre conventions (Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, 1994); and/or intertwined film-in-film and narrative-in-narrative structures (Almodóvar’s La mala educación, 2004), etc. Bordwell 1985: 9ff. It amplifies the diegetic space (thus Bordwell [1985: 119] speaks of “sound perspective”) and emphasizes modulation of the visual impact through creating a sonic décor or sonic space. For this reason, Ėjxenbaum transferred the structuring of cinematographic meaning to “new conditions of perceptions”: it is the viewer who moves “to the construction of internal speech” ([1926] 1973: 123). In the 1980s, the more systematic narrative discourse of the Wisconsin School resorted to a cognitive and constructivist approach, defining the narrative scheme as an optional “redescription of data under epistemological restraint” (Branigan 1992: 112). The basic trajectory of the classical Hollywood ideal (also taken over by UFA and other national film industries) involves establishing a cause-and-effect logic, a clear subject-object relation, and a cohesive effect of visual and auditive perception aimed at providing the story with an “organic” meaning, however different the shots that are sliced together might be. Chapter 2: Irish Road Movies - Narrative Strategies Re-imagined Chapter 3: Irish Romantic Comedy - Strategies of Characterization Chapter 4: Immersed in Two Traditions - Adam & Paul, Garage and Prosperity Chapter 5: A Modern Love Story - Nora Chapter 6: Alternative Narrative … The same holds true for all elements of sound (see § 3.1.7). As an industrial product, it also reflects the historical state of technology in its narrative structure, whether it is a silent film with intertitles or a film using high-resolution digital multi-track sound, whether a static camera is turned on the scene or a modern editing technique lends the images an overpowering kinetic energy, etc. Very often such films get along without misreporting in terms of “lying pictures” (i.e. Create a timeline of your own with five stages (use screenshots from the film if possible) Identify the five key stages of the narrative: Act 1. Our example in Film Art, Pare Lorenz’s The River, relies on the classic rhetorical structure of problem/ solution. To reveal the capacities to represent subjectivity and mental processes in film, i.e. To create an automatic citation reference for the entire article, copy and paste the reference from the text box. 1 RTF 317: Narrative Strategies in Film and Television Taught for 4 terms (Winter 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2012 and Summer 2012) Instructor: R. Colin Tait Email: rcolintait@gmail.com Office hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 11:30-1 and by appointment Description of Course: The main features of narrative strategies in literature can also be found in film, although the characteristics of these strategies differ significantly. He understands focalization in terms of knowledge, i.e. The first systematic interest in narratology came from the semiotic turn of film theory starting in the 1960s, notably with Metz’s construct of the grande syntagmatique (1966). Earlier attempts at defining film exclusively along the lines of visualization were meant to legitimize it as an art form largely independent of the esta… the single shot in cinema), the concept of “code” was used to encompass more extensive syntagmata in film such as sequences and the whole of the narration. Fulton emphasizes the role of sound in film: “[It] is one of the most versatile signifiers, since it contributes to field, tenor and mode as a powerful creator of meaning, mood and textuality” (Fulton 2005: 108). Ryan, Marie Laure (2005). Various levels of structuring, perception and cognition, many of them rooted in convention, are related to a logic of combination which determines the basic qualities of filmic narration. (b) If narrative is a fundamental issue in filmic signification, its logic must be re-examined with new ways of storytelling in cinema that play games or lead the viewer into a maze of ontological uncertainties. Kuhn (ibid.) Postmodern narrative strategies in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas ... narrative, at the second level, will then be a metadiegetic narrative.

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