Readings Relating to Non-Narrative and Experimental Films

Marie-Laure Ryan attempts to define and differentiate narrative and story in this reading. The incorrect interpretations of narrative that have formed over time from identity to capitalised history are explained and a guideline to the conditions within narrative are explained extensively.

The variety of mediums available for creating various forms of content offer individuals an opportunity to define their work at some stage in the process. Ryan’s definition aims to assist these individuals in accurately assessing their work by highlighting the importance of ‘semantic features’ and expanding the concept past the traditional verbal forms of narrative. This definition also seeks to relevance across all mediums.

Ryan explains ‘story, like narrative discourse, is a representation, but unlike discourse it is not a representation encoded in material signs. Story is a mental image, a cognitive construct that concerns certain types of entities and relations between these entities’ (2006, p. 7).

The audience has the power to interpret content of any kind and therefore the outcome individuals comprehend may be different to what the creator intended.

Ian Bogost discusses the idea of lists in this reading. The non-narrative format of a list should not be thought of as any less of a device for communicating an idea because it is not thought of as artistically expressive. In facts, the simplicity of lists provide the creator with freedom to focus on the idea/concept rather than abstracting it to form some sort of poetry. This idea of lists as a form of cataloging is relevant to many pieces of work that are considered art.

Bogost claims that lists ‘do not just rebuff the connecting powers of language but rebuff the connecting powers of being itself’ (2012, p. 39).