Tag Archives: narrative

Week 06: Reflections

Well, it seems like we’re all very much stuck on this conception of narrative which I know I certainly am having difficulty getting my head around (even after writing this post on narrative here). A lot of the questions in today’s symposium were surrounding narrative and how we should think about it. What I gathered from the discussion is that the idea of what constitutes a narrative is still evolving. We shouldn’t be reductive and say ‘only x and y’ are narratives because it can make us miss a lot of things. However, Adrian seemed to disagree with this and reiterate that everything other than cause-and-effect is a series of random events. He stated that narrative infers – the events are not accidental and it is all related. He said to think that we can ‘narrate’ our own lives is an anthropomorphic vision that occurs when we see ourselves as storytelling machines. We can narrate afterwards, but otherwise it’s just cause-and-effect.

Next, we moved on to talk about interpretation and whether a filmmaker should try and control their audience’s interpretation of a work. Seth doesn’t like being told what to think and prefers the open structure. I agreed with what someone said about how it’s nice to be surprised, as opposed to constantly having your expectations met (this relates to the post I wrote on expectations here). Adrian pointed out that in language, everything only makes sense because of its relationship to everything else. When you look in a dictionary, a definition can only ever be described by other words. Things only meet something by virtue of the network of other things it finds itself in. So, therefore, as Ryan notes, “we can never be sure that sender and received have the same story in mind” because there is always a mismatch. Filmmakers cannot control interpretation: they have never been able to and they never will be able to. Adrian says that stories are a dance; meaning is a dance. I get the impression that Adrian likes to dance, in this sense.

We went on to talk more specifically about Korsakow and how it uses/rejects narrative. Adrian posed us the question – is Korsakow the right place to be telling a story?  Ryan says her sixth criteria for identifying narrative is the notion of closure, but this isn’t necessarily possible in K-films because there’s not really an ending (unless you use an end SNU, which is somewhat counterproductive to the software). Adrian thinks that the viewer should find their own sense of closure/an end to a work by deciding if they want to leave it there, or leave and come back (which is why Korsakow has the interesting feature of the continue option when you open a K-film). K-films are not disposable, one-off works. They’re designed to be grazed at. For Adrian, closure is mechanical. It’s the last page. The last frame. The closing credits. He used the example of fan-fction as a way to show us that it’s not up to the author to decide where the end it. People will decide it for themselves. Story is not medium specific, but the telling of it is. And it’s the telling of a story that matters, not the story itself. It think that’s why I love the above photo so much.

(Image via flickr)

Week 05: Narrative

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.

(Image via flickr)

Week 04: Reflections

A key point from today’s symposium was the hybridisation of the media. A lot of content can no longer just be called a singular form (such as TV which is now a multi-media product; a conglomerate of elements; entangled with online websites, advertising, and interaction). Adrian made an interesting point about reality TV saying it was where computer games meet television. The logic of these shows all involve a quest, or levelling up. They mirror our experiences, which is why we find it compelling.

We then went on to discuss the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, and what impact mobile technology has had on it. Someone pointed out that phone conversations used to happen in private phone booths, but now conversations are conducted in public spaces, allowing those around you to hear at least 50% of the conversation. Armand Mattelart, a Belgian media theorist, even goes as far as ‘participating’ in these conversations that play out around him, explaining to the person on the phone that they shouldn’t think that their conversation is private. We have very changed ideas on what public spaces now are. Whereas they used to be the coffeehouses of 19th century Europe, we have been trained to direct our sites of discussion more inward, with a current interest in the self. This can be seen with Apple’s branding, how they individualise each of their products to ‘belong’ to you (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc). Adrian think we can build tools that either restrict our access/ability to look outside our own world view, or that enable this: it’s very much about how you approach it.

We spoke about the democratisation of media, and the accessibility which is unlocked as a result. Seth sees this as creating more opportunities, as more people have the possibility to make films now. However Adrian warned us of a conservative minority voice that exists in someone like Andrew Keen’s writings about how amateur production is eating away at professional production. I really don’t like this style of argument, and find it elitist. Whilst I understand what he means, I think so much more could be achieved creatively by accepting and embracing the possibilities that new ‘types’ of filmmakers can bring to the profession. It allows for more voices, more diversity, and ultimately more communication. We were also warned that this discussion relies on a very privileged definition of ‘films’ and ‘filmmaking’ – do we call ourselves filmmakers if we only use our iPhone? No. If we write a letter, are we a novelist? No. If you know stuff, are you an expert? No.

We went on to speak at length about narrative, which led me to write this blog post which looks into it further.

(Image via flickr)