Category Archives: Week 8

Storytelling

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“Everything is story, story is everything.”

This weeks reading: The Substance of Story focuses heavily on how writers/storytellers use protagonists cause an audience reaction. Although I found the reading to be extremely interesting and helpful it began to make me wonder about if you could tell a story without using a protagonist.

Audience want to recognise a shared humanity in their movie characters, as long as your paper clip character, has some eyes and a strong desire to fix his problems a bond is formed with him.  So what happens if you take away character and focus on subjects? Is the story about the tree falling in the forest a story without a person there to duck and weave a branch? Can we as creatives tell stories using subjects rather than characters?

An example that sprung to my mind was Stan Brakhage experimental film: The Dante Quartet, a short silent film which was created by painting images directly onto the film. There are no characters only text and movement of colour divided into four parts: Hell Itself, Hell Spit Flexion, Purgation and existence is song. 

For me the spilt into four different parts tell a story of a journey through hell, and the way the paint moves faster or colours are repeated show what each of these stages are like. This feels like a narrative without a protagonist however it’s easy to say that the film maker is the protagonist or that it’s simply not a narrative at all.

This question is something I might want to look into exploring through the continuation of my course.

You can watch The Dante Quartet here

Mindmaping

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Brainstorming done in todays tutorial about institutions.  We as a group started with the two institutions that interested us, Cinema and Network TV. We began to list different forms of cinema and tv and connect issues to them under: economical, political, cultural and social brackets. Some of the ideas and issues we came up with are:

– What are the benefits of watching movies at an institution?
– Censorship and cultural control
– How cinema is used to breach cultural gaps
– How cinema uses it’s practice to target it’s audience

From here after a discussion with Dan we were able to narrow down our focus and look at how Film Festivals as an institution capture a lot of the ideas we were toying with above. We as a group are looking at how Film Festivals are an institution and what role they play politically, culturally and socially. A good starting point for us, when looking for articles would looking at how film festivals are defined as institutions, what they afford and prohibit their audiences or a good case study of how film festivals are used in Melbourne to cover the four main issues we’ve identified.

To start we’re each going to look at least five articles around film festivals before we meet on Tuesday where we will then see what we’ve found and what we can add. Overall I’m pleased with how well we all worked as a group today and excited to continue our brief.

Narrative and Non Narrative

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It’s very often asked if experimental films have form or narrative? At first glance it’s easy to dismiss an film without words, characters or a clear conclusion. However I believe that it’s through pattern, and repetition that form and narrative can be conveyed in films that are more abstract. For example in the film we watched today ‘We Have Decided Not To Die’  I think still has a narrative that runs through it, even if it wasn’t it’s intention. The act of framing the the film into three separate rituals gives us the impression of three acts, or in this case there are three different stories being told. Even the title seems to give the three protags causality they have all chosen not to die so it’s a way you can make sense of whats happening to each of the figures in the story, it also seems like the characters go from one state to another mimicking that of a journey.  In class we came up with our own reasons as to what made this film narrative and non-narrative.

Narrative
-the film is broken up into parts to follow (each ritual)
-the characters seem to go from one state to another
-the title explains the will behind the three protags
-each part has an emotion low follow be an emotion high

Non Narrative
-visions of weird stuff happened, no representation, nothing is said
-whole piece is in a state of chaos
-lack of conclusion
-characters are props, no motivation

Although I agree with a lot thats said here, but I still believe that just because there seems like there’s nothing literal going on a narrative can still be conveyed in ways that’s abstract, because there are many different ways of story-telling. Even though it’s not clear it still shows the journey of three different people who are choosing not to die.You can view the film here.

We Have Decided Not To Die from Sion Roberts on Vimeo.