Narrative

Narrative is the first piece in the semantic puzzle of the word ‘cinematic’. It runs through both photography and cinema and humans seem drawn to it. At the most basic level narrative is a story. A world of new people and places apart from our own to get lost in. A good narrative is an exercise in empathy by caring for the wellbeing of completely fictional characters. The best narratives immerse the audience completely. The most successful narratives are not exhaustive lists of everything that happened, such a direct method can feel cold and push an audience away. A well told story, one that tricks an audience into believing in it, is an illusion.

Written, spoken and stage performed fiction have been creating immersive narratives for as long as language has existed but in the twenty-first century, growing up with cinema as one of the dominant forms of art and entertainment it is understandable that many artists and audiences would find it as their anchor when navigating the visual arts.

The phrase cut to the chase is a common one. When a storyteller is losing their audience as their story wanders into irrelevance it is what an audience will say. Cut to the chase. But when a story is totally engaging, when the novel, the film, the speaker, has the audience on the edge of their seat anticipating the next action they do not often stop to think how did we get here? What has been cut out? It fools an audience into believing a new impossible reality where time and space are bent, where days, weeks, months, years are compressed into maybe a few hours, where seconds are stretched into minutes. People materialise in a whole new location with barely even a mention of how they got there. Maybe violence and guns and crime are commonplace, maybe magic is real and a man in a red cape flies through the sky every day. A good story removes reality, to a greater or lesser extent, to present a digestible and engaging new reality. This new reality focuses the important aspects of the story, but these illusory aspects are what we expect from cinema in all its excitement and bombast. Time is the first victim of storytelling. It is almost impossible to represent it in its true form and still tell a comprehensible story. Photography freezes time, either a moment or some longer length of time, forever into one still frame. Cinema could be described as photography with the added illusion of time. Time passes in a film for certain, but it does not pass as it does in the real world. Illusion is part of what makes cinema cinematic. The manipulation of time through montage is only the beginning of how cinema works, however. The aesthetics of film, the sound and the influences and experiences that an artist and audience bring to a work are all equally important.