CS2027 Week 2: Classical Narrative Form

What are Narratives and What are the Principles of Narrative Form?

Time

Space

Plot & Story

Openings, Closings and Patterns of Development

Story Information

Cause and Effect

Narrative is a chain of events linked by cause and effect, occurring in time and space

The - events begin and must follow a pattern of change & stability, connected by causality,

  • time
  • or space.

there may be parallelism: characters, settings, situations, times of day etc.

The story is the chain of events in chronological order. It can be presented in various ways.

Plot is how we present the story, how we organize events around characters. Each plot is likely to have different effects on the viewers

Filmmakers build the plot from the story, viewers build the story from the plot.

how does the viewer build story from the plot we see in films?

by making assumptions and inferences about the information and cues presented on screen to determine the causes, temporal sequences

eg. skyscrapers, bustling pedestrians, congested traffic: we infer from the space that we are in a city at rush hour

  • diegesis: world of story action that is assumed to exist within the world the film depicts. (eg. people, skyscapers)
  • non-diegetic: material that lies outside the story world (eg. credits & music, animations, comic words, documented images)
  • the sum total of all the events in the narratives, presented directly (display them in the plot) or hint (by reference) or ignore them and let viewers infer

Story-plot distinction

Characters Create Causes & registers the Effects

Who function as causes to events?

They make things happen and respond to events. Their actions and reactions directly impact the story.

Characters in film have a visible body: gender, age, and race.

Characters in film have traits; attitudes, skills, habits, tastes, psychological drives and other qualities

These traits will play causal roles in the overall story action & serves a narrative function.

Environment and Natural occurrence create causes & Characters react to the effects.
(eg. disaster films, virus films, Jaws)

We look for Causal motivation

what might have caused an event? what effects (other causes) might it bring about?

  • causal motivation involve the planting of information in advance of a scene

Hiding the Causes,
only presenting the enigmatic effects to arouse curiosity

(eg. cache, a married couple receives an anonymous video tape and we are motivated to find out who made it and why it was made.)

Hiding the Effects,
we speculate the outcomes ourselves & leaves an open ending.

  • manipulating time with plot & story

Temporal Order: How are events Sequenced

Temporal Duration: How Long do the Events take?

Temporal Frequency: How Often do we See or Hear an Event?

Out of chronological order:

  • flashbacks,
  • flashforwards
  • shapes viewers expectations, creates surprises that maintains our interest
  • film noir exemplifies this

Plot duration: some plots depict years and decades passing, others unfold within days, or even overnight

Screen duration: the run time of a film

  • screen duration is independent of the story time or plot time. It is edited.
  • it can be approximate to the same time as the character's lives
  • it can expand story duration (using slow-motion, a 2 second thing is now a 1 minute thing)
  • it can compress story duration (2 days into 2 minutes of run-time using rapid cuts or transitions)

Story duration: the whole story's duration, including the character's background. (may not be displayed on screen.)

  • single event presented in the plot once
  • single event presented in the plot several times in flashbacks
  • single event presented in the plot several times with different multiple narrators

why repeat a story event in the plot?

  • to remind the audience of something
  • reveal new information
  • Cues prompt us about the choronological sequences & guides us through the broken timeline: eg. clothes, age, settings
  • our ordinary sense of time and cause and effect help make assumptioons and inferences
  • reconstructing story time on the basis of ploot

Puzzle films denies this degree of unity and clarity: creating perplexing patterns of story time or causality

manipulating space with plot and story

Off-screen Locales

  • the audience imagines story spaces that are never shown, oonly through dialogue

On-screen Locals

Screen Space: visible space within the frame

  • screen space selects a portion of plot space to depict information and withhold others

Openings

Development Sections

  • provides a basis and initiates audience into narrative.
  • raises expectations by setting up the causes

Setups in films:
1) tells us about the characters and their situation before an Event is caused.
2) in medias res: thrown into the middle of an action that has already started & we speculate on the causes

Exposition in plot is the portion of the plot that lays out the backstory and the current predicament the character is in--this can take place anywhere the director chooses to reveal, doesn't have to open with an exposition (although usually early)

  • causes and effects create patterns of development as the film proceeds

Change in Knowledge

  • a character learns something crucial in the course of the action

Goal Oriented Development

  • steps needed to achieve an object or condition and one must be achieved before the other.
  • searches, investigations etc.

Space can structure plot development: confining action to a single locale, one location connecting to multiple characters

Time can provide plot patterns: a deadline, a specific historical period, a specific stage of life.

eg. stuck in a car ride, haunted house, chungking express eatery etc.

eg. coming-of-age, ticking bombs

Climaxes & Closings

all of these plot patterns can be combined!

jacques tati's playtime narratives combines all these

patterns of development create long-term expectations that can be cheated, delayed or gratified

Climatic: resolving causal issues or present a narrow range of possible outcome to the actions

the chain of cause and effect is closed.
Tension from climax releases

Anti-climatic closings: deliberately leaving expectations unfulfilled

Range of Story information

  • Deciding what information to give the spectator and when to supply it, from whose perspective to tell it
  • distributing story information in order to achieve specific effects
  • range & depth are independent variables.
  • film's plot selects only certain stretches of story duration.

Depth of Story Information

Unrestricted

  • Narrator is omniscient--we know more, see more and hear more than any characters can.
    (eg. film about WWII, we know who wins but the characters don't)

Restricted

  • We don't know any more than the character do

gives a good overview to the broader contexts, understanding each character's specific psyches

creates curiosity, tension and surprise by retaining information and hiding important causes.

degrees of information can be revealed slowly as the narrative progresses. Initially we may know more than the character does, but slowly, we may lose this power if the director obscures information


  • all depends on the director's intentions

Alfred Hitchcock: while restricted narration can create surprise, a dose of unrestricted narration helps to build suspense. (eg. the public knows a bomb is placed and explodes, will the people in the film escape?)

HOWEVER

Parasite?

Objective

Subjective

plunges into the character's psychological state and access into what the characters experience and hears from their POV

only observing what the characters say out loud and carry out.

POV shots taken from the character's optical stand-point; sound perspectives taken from the character's surrounding

techniques that enhances perceptual subjectivity

hearing internal thoughts, seeing hallucinations, memories and flashbacks: going beyond the character's senses and into their minds

techniques that enhances mental subjectivity

  • no narrative is purely subjective or objective--mostly a mix of both! the subjective bracketed by the objective such that it is obvious which is which.
  • sometimes this can be elusive and ambiguous depending on the director

increases our sympathy for the character & cues expectations about what the characters will say or do; yields information about the characters traits

effective way of withholdiing information; we don't know the characters deeply-- curious

The Narrator

Character

Non Character

Frame: what you see between the limitations of the camera lens (composition, mise-en-scene)
Shot: a long continuous take (doesn't cut)
Scene: A series of shots in which a type of action is carried out from start to finish.
Sequence: Multiple scenes that contribute thematically to the action.

chain of events, cause and effect,happening in time and space