Everything Is Awesome

everything is story, story is everything

This week we went over what warrants something as a narrative. We loosely defined narrative as any kind of retelling of a sequence of events with logical ordered sequences, but is that really the only way to form a narrative. There is obviously the factor of causality ,cause and effect, within narratives but can’t a story exist as a expression and vague ideas rather than a clear outlines plot? Obviously a story cannot exist without certain key aspects. For a story to exist there needs to be characters, actions and events caused by those actions: logical progression from one event to the next. However it could be argued that some narratives don’t need all of these to create a narrative.

Like this short film, not all stories need to be clear cut and defined by the mainstream ideals of narrative. A story can exist through many different things. In class we had to find reasons of how “We Have Decided Not To Die” was or was not a narrative.

Jeremy found narrative aspects in:

• The title cards creating a linear story
• The conclusion cross-cutting between the three characters connecting their stories
• People as central figures helps audience connect to them
• How they arrived to their situations (backstory)
• Movement could indicate pain and struggle, and narrative can stem from character suffering
• Thematic connection, patterns of representation
• Different places create a journey
• Parallel events (parallel editing)
• Title gives film causality and character motivation

I explored the non-narrative aspects that could be possible including:

• There was no obvious causality
• No clear character development
• No clear diegetic plotline
• No clear linear events tying scenes together
• That the graphic matches were to make art, not story
• Lack of cohesion
• Non representation (something not explicitly said can mean it is not a narrative element)
• Lack of conclusion/sense of closure
• No character motivation or interaction
• People were seen as props not characters

This exercise was difficult for me because I tend to not think to abstractly about film’s and products, but after the lesson I think I have a better grasp on what dictates a narrative and what people can interpret from moving image. Narrative could be subjective, and it is up to the viewer to decide whether to imply story to something or just to observe it as art.