“The protagonist must be empathetic (whether or not he is sympathetic).”
— Robert McKee (1997) 1
I think there is no better embodiment of this principal (that you don’t have to like a character for their characterisation to be successful) than David Brent.
Michael Rabiger (2009)1, a professor and academic specialising in documentary studies, gives a helpful and succinct summary of the three-act narrative structure:
The name given to this collection of changes and developments is the dramatic or story arc, and each individual moment of change is called a beat.
I still struggle with the idea that rigid structures like three-act narrative are necessarily good. My natural inclination is to suspect that such formulaic progressions are used not just as vague guides but as templates that actually hinder the development of interesting or new stories. Indeed, some of my filmmaker friends seem entirely wedded to the idea that particular story beats must occur at certain points in their script.
But basically all of the films it’s possible to see in mainstream cinemas today, even those I would consider “unconventional”, are still governed by three-act structure even if the structure is not immediately identifiable. The only films that truly eschew traditional structures like these are the genuinely experimental films of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker and Maya Deren.
In today’s Lectorial we learned the basic building blocks that every story (be it cinema, theatre, literature, etc.) must be built upon.
Narrative, broadly, can be thought of as an intrinsic value of all humanity, a way that we make sense of our surroundings and communicate across cultures through universal experience. When talking specifically about media, narrative has a short list of key elements:
Each of these elements serves a particular purpose in building a narrative. First, a story needs to have an inciting incident and a controlling idea – a point, something that the author is trying to say. Every element of the story must work to prove or demonstrate this controlling idea in some way. Typically this is achieved by challenging it, because there are very ideas that are self-evidently “true” when it comes to creative media, and those that may exist vary across audiences/cultures.
Then characters must populate the narrative – two character types are of particular importance to building narrative: the protagonist/s and antagonist/s. The protagonist is usually the character who drives the action, the one from whose perspective the film is told, or the character who changes the most over the progression of the story. The antagonist, or antagonists, need not be the protagonist’s literal enemy, but their wishes generally lie in opposition to the protagonist.
Once the story is set up and the characters have been introduced, the progression of the story is achieved by use of conflict. Robert McKee (1997) 1 offers three levels of conflict that occur in a story, depicted as concentric circles around the protagonist in order of proximity:
These elements always operate within the genre of the work, which include wider assumptions and conventions that the audience holds from being previously exposed to works in that genre. For example, the conflict may take two very different forms depending on whether the work is a psychological horror film or a romantic opera.
Though these definitions and guidelines seem quite rigid and inflexible, they seem broad enough that they would encompass the vast majority of many and varied texts in existence (though they are not without their detractors).
For certain types of media, textual analysis seems quite natural and obvious. Attempting to find meaning in visual art, cinema, music, television, etc. (where there is an author and they are trying to elicit some kind of meaningful response from an audience) is a relatively normal thing to do and is generally an inherent part of understanding that piece of media.
But I’ve begun to realise that almost any form of communication can be read as a text. Building on our exercise in Week 1 in which we surveyed the visible media at the State Library, practically every part of our environment can be analysed in this way, including things as small and seemingly insignificant as directional and traffic signage.
Why is a stop sign red, and why is it octagonal? What meanings are connoted by these aesthetic properties? Why do the directional signs at Emporium use a sans serif typeface and monochrome colour scheme? Answering these questions can explain how society functions on a deeper level. Even an entire city as a whole could be analysed in this methodical way — what are the semiotic signs and codes that can be identified within it, and what part do they play in forming meaning?
I picked up on an interesting point from this week’s reading Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis, that depending on the culture to which the interpreter of a text belongs, a text can mean very, very different things. It reminded me of a fascinating BBC Horizon programme I watched online about five years ago, in which researchers performed experiments and found that people from the Himba tribe in Namibia could not identify the blue square in the right half of this diagram:
The researchers discovered that Himba, who culturally and linguistically treat blue and green as the same colour (with just one umbrella word that describes both), but have hundreds of words to describe individual shades of green, actually see the blue square as being visually indistinguishable from the green. And the opposite was also true – Himba were able to positively identify two different shades of green in the left half of the diagram that, to westerners, were seen as a single hue (spoiler: it’s the same position as the blue square).
Unfortunately the documentary I saw is no longer available online, but the next best thing is the xkcd colo(u)r survey, in which web comic artist and former NASA engineer Randall Monroe surveyed over 200,000 people and asked them to name colours. The differences in results from men and women is really interesting – although it must be remembered that the data set for this particular study is incredibly small and skewed (not just to people of the western world, but specifically to people who read xkcd) – and backs up the idea that what I see may not match what you see.
The results of both these studies prove that even something as seemingly universal as the interpretation of colour can vary widely between cultures. The differences would get wider and wider as you move further up into high-level cultural differences – making it a wonder we’re able to function as a global society with common thoughts and interpretations at all.
The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.
Last week we learned that mise-en-scène refers to “what’s in the frame”. Cinematography, by contrast, is how the scene is captured by the camera. It is the act of photographing what’s in the frame.
There are several elements that cinematographers must consider when shooting, from light characteristics (contrast and exposure), speed of the camera, perspective (focal length and depth of field), framing (angle, distance, masking and camera position), movement (panning, tilting and tracking), and duration. Special effects are also a subset of cinematography, because effects control what ends up in the photographic frame.
David Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides exercise precise control over the cinematography in Zodiac, showing as much meticulous attention to detail as the serial killer that is the object of Robert Graysmith’s obsession.
At surface level, Zodiac’s most obvious visual attribute is its strong yellow-green hue, achieved through costume and set design but also prominently through exposure and colour grading. This nostalgic colour pallet helps sell the film’s period setting (1960s and 1970s), but it also gives the entire film the feeling of decaying flesh, which links in with the film’s themes of death and unfulfilled obsession.
Power dynamics are also communicated through staging and mise-en-scène, as well as the cinematography techniques of focus and depth of field. In the scene where Arthur Leigh Allen is interviewed by the three detectives, the relative position of each character places him in a power relationship with the other characters in the scene. By focusing (or not focusing) on objects that have lead the detectives to suspect Allen of being the Zodiac, Fincher steers his audience to look for all the circumstantial evidence that points to the same conclusion.
Zodiac also uses framing in interesting ways. For example, in the scene set at Bob Vaughn’s house immediately after Graysmith discovers that one of the most important pieces of handwriting evidence actually belongs to Vaughn, the next shot shows Graysmith centred in frame using a medium shot that accentuates the hallway walls on either side of him, isolating him at the centre of the frame almost literally inside a tunnel as his realisation comes into focus. It’s the only shot in the film that so obviously isolates a character in this way, and it helps to set up the danger of the next thrilling scene where Graysmith follows Vaughn down into the basement, unsure of whether he might be the Zodiac or not.
In discussing textual analysis this week, and in particular the idea that interpretation is dependent upon (and dictated by) context, I started thinking about artistic intent and how big or small an influence it has on the interpretation of a work.
One of the major shifts in the discourse of cinema occurred in line with the development of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, when feminist film theory became an active area of study based on the idea that the cinema of the early 20th century reflected the place of women in wider society, and that cinema is a tool used by a patriarchal society to reinforce the idea of a natural difference between sexes (and the inferences that can be drawn from this idea, that women should possess certain qualities, act in certain ways, etc.). This topic is explored in Molly Haskell’s 1973 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, and the paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (published in 1975), and has continued to develop in the decades since.
The filmmakers discussed by Haskell, Mulvey and others were presumably not consciously striving to make a comment on the place of women in society, or perpetuate damaging stereotypes, but post hoc interpretation took those films and analysed them as artefacts in the context of wider society at the time they were made. Artistic intent was irrelevant; the signs and signifiers of the texts themselves were the things deemed important and worthy of study.
Feminist film theory shows that texts can be analysed and found to hold certain qualities or attributes that the creator may not have intended, even long after the work was created. People are still analysing Italian renaissance art and interpreting what it reflects of 15th and 16th century society, and scholars in the 24th century will probably be doing the same for art being created right now.
It’s a slightly scary idea that your work could be analysed by others decades or centuries after its creation and found to hold qualities or attributes that you never intended — but, then again, that’s one of the beautiful things about discourse: it shifts and changes as much as art itself does. The fact that there can never be any one “correct” interpretation of a text is central to the ongoing conversation of cultural criticism.
In our workshop this week we were assigned a group exercise to familiarise ourselves with the Sony MC50 video camera. My group mates Riah and Isobel came up with the structure and concept for the video, based around the theme of “a survival guide to your first six weeks at University”, which we then filmed in and around Building 80.
We tried to go for a more light-hearted, comedic treatment of the subject rather than a straightforward question-answer format, and so we introduced the thumbs-up motif to serve as punctuation for each of our cut-away shots.
We ended up shooting way more footage than we could conceivably use in the finished edit, so I had to cut a lot of the best answers/shots which was disappointing, but overall I’m pretty happy with the result. The narrative ties together nicely when edited, and thanks to Riah’s great first answer I managed to make it clear that the video is about tips for surviving university without needing opening titles or narration.
The only real technical problems we encountered were that the lapel mic’s extension cord connection was a bit dodgy and left some pops and crackles on the audio track, and the automatic white balancing made the green background look different across shots. I should have used the camera’s inbuilt display to view back footage we’d shot and make sure it looked consistent, but we were so conscious of time that we shot everything in one take before moving on. When I use this camera and microphone set-up in the future I’ll make sure to tape the audio connection in place and input technical settings manually.
Another key learning I took from this exercise is to ensure there is ample clear space before and after each shot, because J-cuts are much easier when you have extra material either side of the cut. It ended up being OK in this instance, but in my Project Brief 3 I’ll make sure I keep the camera rolling as long as possible.
I also wish we had recorded more ambient sound to build atmosphere, but since that wasn’t really part of the exercise we didn’t worry too much about it. Overall, I give this exercise a thumbs up.
Louise Turley’s practical introduction to the basics of interview technique was incredibly valuable to me. I’ve done some informal interviews before (mostly with bands and musicians) but never really learned about the techniques themselves and why they are employed.
The most important aspects of interviewing can be summed up in “The 5 Ws”: who, what, where, when and why.
I’m glad I learned of these techniques before conducting my interview for Project Brief 3, because I was able to better prepare for the interview and as a result I think I got much more usable footage than I otherwise may have.
Interviewing technique is also part of Alex Blumberg’s 21-lesson Creative Live course Power Your Podcast With Storytelling, which I’ve been meaning to watch. Maybe now’s the perfect time.
