28/4 WEEK 8 LECTORIAL || NARRATIVES

Today Daniel spoke to us about narrative, and just how important causality is to the telling of a story.

|||EVERYTHING IS STORY ||| STORY IS EVERYTHING”|||

It was the lectorial I’ve found the most engaging so far, Daniel presented some really awesome videos to contextualise the concepts he presented. Especially after working on Project Brief 3 recently, and attempting to create a logical progression of events and ordered sequences to create a plausible narrative about someone, the difficulty of making a story flow as well as the importance of doing so became very evident.

Daniel described three important elements of causality

1. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

This takes time, a character cannot simply be dropped into a scene and the audience expected to know how or why they are there, or how they will affect the narrative. When new characters appear, Daniel described that there will often be an event that will establish some of the characters traits or their background – which allows the new character to emerge from a blank canvas and become a fully formed character to the audiences due to their reactions to said event. I had never really critically examined the way characters are introduced into narratives, but the way Daniel phrased this happening during the Lectorial made a lot of sense to me.. (When I’ve done all of my PB4 Annotated Bibliography readings and have some time to watch something guilt-free I’ll be sure to keep an eye out on how characters are introduced, and their development)

2. PLOT

The chronological sequence of events within a narrative obviously contains the clues that allow an audience to submerge themselves into a story that they aren’t a part of – I guess that this is imperative to good storytelling.

3. RESOLUTION

The culmination of all of the preceding action. And how angry are you when you sit through a film for 2 hours and none of the problems presented are cleared up at the end and you’re expected to face the harsh light of day outside of the cinema and act like everything’s okay. It’s not. Maybe resolution is the most important element of narrative, to leave the audience with a good taste in their mouth.

A QUOTE FROM THIS WEEKS READING

“The stuff of story is alive but intangible” Robert Mckee, Story, p135

Humans have long since been motivated to pull apart a story to understand how and why they are made. Why do we do this? Daniel noted Aristotle as one of the oldest known literary critics, whose writing on narrative, matter, genre, theme, dictation, melody and spectacle among other things paved the way for literary criticism, and his writings are still of importance today. This made me realise how little I know, of Aristotle and his writings, maybe that’s something else I can look into when I have some free time.

At one point in the presentation Daniel compared the stories of religious figures such as Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad and Buddha as containing elements of the heroes journey, as described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, much like those found in modern pop culture references like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Star Wars.

A succinct summary of the heroes journey from The Hero With A Thousand Faces:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man”

Justin and I paired up, as per usual, for the class activity in which we plotted the emotional highs and lows of The Lion King, and then attempted to rate the characters according to prominence during each act of the movie. I struggled a little with the character prominence due to the amount of time it’s been since I saw the film, but the overall activity was great to do. At the end a few groups plotted their findings, across a range of different movies, on the board and they all followed a similar format, ranging from high emotional intensity to low over the course of the movie. I can’t think of a film off the top of my head which keeps the emotional intensity on high for the majority of the film but it would be exhausting to watch.

Daniel mentioned that there is no such thing as an original idea, only the re-telling of a story in a different way and it is this – the way a plot is told is the exciting part of story telling.. Is this another reference to post-modernism? The way stories are told follow certain themes or patterns which gives audiences an idea about what to expect, and if audiences can recognise the signs they will have some idea of what will happen in the unfolding of the narrative.

Daniel showed us Red Hot Riding Hood, Tex Avery’s 1943 cartoon re-make of the well know folktale. I thought this was a great example of different ways stories can be told, giving a re-imagination of time, place and characters.

To finish off we watched Daniel Askill’s We Have Decided Not To Die – a drama short, containing three wordless acts named

birth

between

re-birth

It is a chillingly lovely film. An abstracted narrative, stretching some of the rules described earlier, but nonetheless I believe it is a narrative.

A short activity followed where we listed some of the elements of the film which pertained elements of narrative or non-narrative.

IT WAS A NARRATIVE

  1. resolution: all three characters were shown in succession at the end, tying their stories together
  2. sequential, logical sequence of events, Birth, Between, Re-Birth
  3. “everything is a story”
  4. Thematically connected, water breaks, cars break, glass break
  5. Pattern of representation, parallel stories
  6. Each scene had a climax

IT WAS NOT A NARRATIVE

  1. Non-representational element, nothing explicitly said
  2. State of constant chaos,
  3. No character development
  4. Tension between art and narrative
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