Last week in IM1, a lot of our discussions circled around the concept of narrative, after the Ryan reading. Before tackling this topic myself, I had to get a clear understanding of what narrative means.
This post was very helpful for me when delineating the difference between narratives and stories. What it says is that stories are event units, and narratives are a system of stories (made up of event units). The example it gave was the Christian figure of Jesus – the immaculate conception is a story, which is a piece of the narrative of Jesus Christ. To visualise this, it’s like the story of the virgin Mary is the section of bricks in the photo above which can be removed and replaced, whereas the larger area of blue bricks is the narrative.
In the symposium, Adrian said that:
Narrative is where story pauses to describe something in a scene.
For example, if we were reading a novel and a character reaches for a gun to shoot an intruder in the house, but the author stops to describe the gun to you, readers understand that the story pauses for description (instead of asking, ‘hold on, in the time it took to describe the gun, wouldn’t he have been shot?).
Stories are teleological, they are defined by the ending. A story can only make sense because of an end. The events of a story are all orientated towards the end. Therefore, it is important to remember that nothing in a story is accidental, everything is set up to go towards the ending. So our lives are not stories, because they haven’t yet ended.
The IM1 course asks us to consider non-narrative (which I have never encountered before). At first I wondered if a non-narrative was just a lack of narrative, but then I realised the mistake was thinking about it as a narrative from the beginning.
In the labs, we looked at a few examples:
‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929)
Seth asked us, is it telling a story? It doesn’t have cause and effect. There is no driving character whose actions we can follow. It is abstract. The music holds the relations together. It is structured together by a chronological order of day into night (almost like a ‘day in the life of’ kind of format). Therefore, we decided that it was an associational non-narrative, where the video had direct/literal relationships with each other as they were kinetically stitched together.
‘Ballet Mecanique’ (1924)
We classed this film as an abstract non-narrative. It flashes through many quickly pieced together clips of a variety of objects and imagery. They are very diverse and difficult to quickly catalogue, although there is an overriding sense of ‘man verse machine’ in the content. The movement is constant and rapid, which adds to the experimental/abstract nature of the film.
Baraka (1992)
This non-narrative explores themes through a kaleidoscopic compilation of nature, humans and technology. The clips are often associational, and use time lapse and slow motion to hint towards the differences between nature and technology. The piece comes across as a whole video collage of non-narrative fragments, which employs rhetoric to create an argument through juxtaposition of opposing relationships (between nature and technology).
I think it is supremely important to keep in mind what Ryan said in the reading:
We can never really be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind.
Adrian wrote up some good summaries of his thoughts on narrative here and here.