Well, it seems like we’re all very much stuck on this conception of narrative which I know I certainly am having difficulty getting my head around (even after writing this post on narrative here). A lot of the questions in today’s symposium were surrounding narrative and how we should think about it. What I gathered from the discussion is that the idea of what constitutes a narrative is still evolving. We shouldn’t be reductive and say ‘only x and y’ are narratives because it can make us miss a lot of things. However, Adrian seemed to disagree with this and reiterate that everything other than cause-and-effect is a series of random events. He stated that narrative infers – the events are not accidental and it is all related. He said to think that we can ‘narrate’ our own lives is an anthropomorphic vision that occurs when we see ourselves as storytelling machines. We can narrate afterwards, but otherwise it’s just cause-and-effect.
Next, we moved on to talk about interpretation and whether a filmmaker should try and control their audience’s interpretation of a work. Seth doesn’t like being told what to think and prefers the open structure. I agreed with what someone said about how it’s nice to be surprised, as opposed to constantly having your expectations met (this relates to the post I wrote on expectations here). Adrian pointed out that in language, everything only makes sense because of its relationship to everything else. When you look in a dictionary, a definition can only ever be described by other words. Things only meet something by virtue of the network of other things it finds itself in. So, therefore, as Ryan notes, “we can never be sure that sender and received have the same story in mind” because there is always a mismatch. Filmmakers cannot control interpretation: they have never been able to and they never will be able to. Adrian says that stories are a dance; meaning is a dance. I get the impression that Adrian likes to dance, in this sense.
We went on to talk more specifically about Korsakow and how it uses/rejects narrative. Adrian posed us the question – is Korsakow the right place to be telling a story? Ryan says her sixth criteria for identifying narrative is the notion of closure, but this isn’t necessarily possible in K-films because there’s not really an ending (unless you use an end SNU, which is somewhat counterproductive to the software). Adrian thinks that the viewer should find their own sense of closure/an end to a work by deciding if they want to leave it there, or leave and come back (which is why Korsakow has the interesting feature of the continue option when you open a K-film). K-films are not disposable, one-off works. They’re designed to be grazed at. For Adrian, closure is mechanical. It’s the last page. The last frame. The closing credits. He used the example of fan-fction as a way to show us that it’s not up to the author to decide where the end it. People will decide it for themselves. Story is not medium specific, but the telling of it is. And it’s the telling of a story that matters, not the story itself. It think that’s why I love the above photo so much.
