In this week’s lectorial, Dan talked about the concepts of narrative and non-narrative. I liked the idea that Dan spoke about of the fact that story is our way of structuring existence: “everything is story and story is everything”. In our daily life we are surrounded by stories, both the ones we consciously choose to experience (e.g. movies) and ones we don’t necessarily recognise (e.g. our friends telling us what they did on the weekend). In its simplest form, narrative is any sequence that the has cause and effect, and this causality is what produces character development, plot and resolution.
Whilst I think most pieces of media have a comprehensible narrative, there are some products that do not have a story at all. However, arguably there can be meaning derived from any piece of media no matter how abstract it is. For example, Daniel Askill’s obscure short film “We Have Decided Not To Die” can be seen as having both narrative and non-narrative aspects when looked at in different ways. The consecutive numbering of title sequences suggests a narrative, but the lack of explicit connection between the headings is a non-narrative element; also an audience can derive a common theme through the ideas presented, but there is no character establishment, development, no high point of conflict and no resolution.
On a related note, Dan’s discussion of narrative reminded me of this video I came across a couple of months ago. In this supercut, Jacob T. Swinney takes the first and last frames of 55 contemporary films and the result is pretty beautiful. I’m a believer in the first and last shots of a film leaving a lasting symbolic impression on the overall feel of a film, and this video in my opinion perfectly captures that essence.
This video is also captures the fascinating idea of Robert McKee’s quote, “the stuff of story is alive but intangible”, as mentioned by Dan in the lectorial. Each of the bookend frames from the films are not enough to form a cohesive representation of the larger narrative, but indeed are ‘alive’ and are hugely impactful and symbolic. Sometimes these frames can be purely representational of the journey that was just undertaken, as is the case with Nebraska and 12 Years a Slave. Sometimes they visually portray a significant change in the film’s main character, like in Shame and The Godfather Part II. Many films begin and end with similar images, giving a full circle feeling, like in Gone Girl. But no matter what first and final frames are used, I think that these are almost always incredibly meaningful in communicating the thematic and narrative elements of a film.
