WJEC GCE AS Film Studies Stuart Grenville-Price Introduction to Narrative
Man is a story-telling animal. Since the dawn of time man has surrounded himself in stories. Narrative is simply a story and a story contains the following features:
Who or what did what to who or what . In other words there are protagonists who can be human or non-human who act upon others. Often these protagonists have typical roles in stories: the hero, the heroine, the villain, the victim,. Stories are, therefore, made up of actions. (see Propp)
Closed stories. There is a clear sense of the action being completeted: a sequence of cause and effect has been played out. A single frame comic strip or cartoon demonstrates this.
Open stories. We see the start of the action, the end of which is inferred by the reader of the text who anticipates and speculates on the potential outcome(s). the reader infers closure. The clichĂŠ ‘ a picture is worth a thousand words’ tends to affirm our sense of being told a story in which the audience infers an outcome. This is the way posters, trailers and front covers work.
Where . All stories take place somewhere even those inside your head.
Plot . Essentially, this is the why of the story. This function explains the causal links between the actions. Narrative links story and plot together. It means the way in which stories are told and the way in which they construct their meanings to achieve audience understanding. Different media forms construct their meaning in different ways using the codes and conventions appropriate to the form.
The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers 1999)
Presented a dystopian view of a thoughtless society. We need narratives that affirm a sense of ourselves. They give sense to our world. Children require stories to be told in exactly the same way and often at the same time of day. It gives them reassurance and the repetition may in itself give pleasure. We also want repetition in the form of stories. The forms are repeatable and formulaic. This suggests the theme, characters the setting, the message or moral is not sufficient. The plot is vital. This is the central messageof the structuralist approach to narrative which emphasises the design of stories and the ways in which they affirm and reflect the basic assumptions. Their repeatability reinforces the basic ideology of a culture and therefore they remain the best place to question some of its assumptions.
Discussthe above and summarise your thoughts
Why do we need more stories? Stories create a sense of closure and yet in closure there are still new possibilities. Producers are well aware of the business of using what is already familiar and accepted by audiences but varying the details to attract new audiences. It is the basis of the concept of genre (which we’ll look at next). In one sense we need more stories because we need different twists and variations to satisfy our curiosity about life itself becausein one simple sense we know that stories are only representations of life. We cannot ‘read’ life itself becauseit is ‘unreadable’.