Tag Archives: story

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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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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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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