Tag Archives: narrative

Cinema Studies

Narrative and Mystery Road

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.

Narrative form is a framework in which a series of events is arranged in time and space, governed by the effects of causality. Narrative films may or may not be presented in chronological story order, the plot duration may or may not match the story duration (usually not), and the space may be real or imagined, but just by operating in such a way that causes and effects occur in some kind of temporal order, in some kind of defined space, means that a film has a narrative.

The plot of Mystery Road is a tiny keyhole through which a sprawling story is viewed. The story stretches back years in the past, across many locations involving hundreds of characters, but the plot is restricted to Jay’s experience investigating a single crime in a relatively small number of locations. So while the story duration is several years, the plot duration is mere days, and the screen duration is just over two hours.

The story information is meted out as Jay discovers it (the narration is subjective), involving the audience in the processes and procedures of detective work as he uncovers the real causes and motivations that lie behind the crime. The story space is quite vast, involving cities, towns and other locations across Australia, but the plot space is restricted only to the locations Jay visits in investigating the crime. Interestingly, the screen space could actually be considered larger than the plot space, because there are a number of gorgeous extreme long shots of vast outback locations that stretch far further than the spaces in which characters interact.

Causality in Mystery Road, as is often the case in thrillers and crime films, is meticulously controlled. Causes turn into effects, which spark more causes, and the plot continues along a narrow thread of story information. The climax of the film resolves the major chains of cause and effect, but there are also significant events that happen off screen, or are presumed to have occurred before or after the plot sequence (most notably the inciting murder).

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Lectorials, Media 1

In Seth Keen’s Lectorial presentation this week he mentioned that narrative films are generally governed by temporal relations, but in non-narrative film the governing force is often spatial. That is, rather than following a cause-and-effect procession, the various elements of an experimental film can work together to create a “space” in the audience’s mind.

A couple of years ago I read a reddit AMA with some of the crew that work on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Attenborough’s films aren’t strictly non-narrative, because they have such prominent narration and they’re generally constructed as a narrative film with characters, settings, etc., but the material they shoot could easily be compiled into an observational documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman if they so choose.

Anyway, I’m a huge Attenborough fan so I read the entire AMA with glee, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: I discovered that in Attenborough’s films (and most nature documentaries) the sound is recorded entirely separately from the video. So when you see amazing video of a bird imitating human noises, chances are it’s actually a bit of a cheat and they’ve just layered audio of one bird over footage of a different bird.

I’d never really given this a conscious thought before but it makes sense in hindsight, because unless you have an incredibly sensitive directional microphone attached to each camera there’s no way you can record the sound of, say, a lion from 300m away and have it sound as crystal clear as it does in the finished product. I guess you could consider it a kind of foley, in a way… where the foley artist is an animal.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the result is a spatial relationship between all the pieces of material (audio and video), which is put together into a whole by the audience in their minds. This is another example of closure, which was discussed early in the semester.

One of the main things I’m learning in Media 1 so far is that so much of the work in making a text coherent is actually done by the audience. Very strange.

Cheating spatial relations

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Narrative and story in a poetic short film with no dialogue

The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:

It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.

It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).

The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).

The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.

Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).

In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.

Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.

So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.

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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

Narrative structure in PB3

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?
    Nostalgic attachment to objects has an influence on our lives far greater than its practical use. People will go to ridiculous lengths to keep and maintain connections to their childhood/former self even if to other people the value may not be immediately apparent. My subject has a small, crappy collection of erasers that he’s kept for over 30 years (through marriages, divorce, moving house multiple times, having children, etc.) and will keep for the rest of his life, purely because of his nostalgic connection to them.
  2. How is your portrait film structured?
    My portrait is structured around an interview with the subject, using voiceover narration to allow the subject to speak about his collection, what it means to him and why he still has it in his possession. While the audio of the interview continues for the entire duration of the video, the subject’s words are supported and reinforced by cut-away shots to B-roll and found footage.
  3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?
    I hope the audience perceives the interviewee as a bit weird or strange to begin with, but as the video continues I hope to spark a feeling of empathy as the audience recognises the same nostalgia in their own lives.
  4. How is your portrait being narrated?
    The only voice heard in my video is the subject’s interview answers as he reflects on his experience. I chose to do this to give the video the feeling of an uninterrupted series of thoughts from the subject, as if he is reflecting on his own history and what it means to him. Because the audio from the interview needs to be cut and pasted together to form coherent thoughts, the structure of the video necessitates cut-away shots to mask edits in the audio.
  5. What role will ‘found footage’ play in your portrait?
    Found footage will be used as reinforcement at certain key points, to illustrate what the subject is speaking about or to create associative connections. I’ve chosen to use vintage footage wherever possible to reinforce the theme of nostalgia.
  6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
    Not in the traditional narrative sense, but I hope that the audience’s realisation of empathy for the subject will be an emotional turning point.
  7. When does this turning point occur in your portrait and why?
    I hope the (gradual) turning point will occur towards the end of the video when my interviewee is explicitly talking about nostalgia and how there is inherent value in still having something you’ve kept for a long time. I’ve structured it this way to allow the audience to come to realise this idea naturally first, and then the subject will emphasis the point in his own words.
  8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?
    Through chronological storytelling, by diving straight into the story and evoking curiosity, and then further explaining and building context.
  9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from?
    Dramatic tension will be built upon the strangeness/uselessness of my subject’s hobby – the audience will wonder why he has such a collection, why he’s kept it so long and, most importantly, why I’ve made a film about it.
  10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution?
    There is a small resolution to the film when my subject accepts and defends the uselessness of his hobby – which is, ultimately, what my film is about.
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Media 1, Readings

Three-act structure

Michael Rabiger (2009)1, a professor and academic specialising in documentary studies, gives a helpful and succinct summary of the three-act narrative structure:

  • ACT I: establishes the setup (characters, relationships, situations and the dominant problem faced by the central character/s
  • ACT II: escalates the complications in relationships as the central character struggles with obstacles
  • ACT III: intensifies the situation to a point of climax or confrontation, which the central character then resolves, often in a climactic way that is emotionally satisfying

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.

  1. Michael Rabiger, 2009, Directing the Documentary, 5th Edition (Focus Press) pp.283-291 ↩
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Lectorials, Media 1

Elements of story and narrative

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:

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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).

  1. McKee, Robert, (1997), ‘The substance of story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154 ↩
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