Can someone tell me what non-narrative is? Click here for a totally inconclusive discussion

Okay so here comes the academia. Prepare thyself:

Audiences have a temporal framework that they use to put things together. Imagine this as a tower of lego bricks on the ground and then the media work chucks you a new brick and you gotta find it’s friends and stick it in there. Eventually you’re gonna have a really big tower but you only have as many bricks as the producer gives you. Sometimes you’ve got a linear or non-linear sequence of events. Narratives and non-narratives alike can have these things. So they are not necessarily related. But they could be. Imagine if someone took lego bricks that didn’t fit together and then threw them at you and you tried to connect them up but couldn’t. Then here you are with a non-narrative work. Is documentary non-narrative? Does it depend on the documentary?

“A narrative is typically: Cause and effect that brings about an end for the narrative.” Cause and Effect is usually sited as the most important element of narrative structure, however that completely discounts all the other elements like point of view, structuring of time and more.

“Non Narrative fits within these categories: Abstract, Categorical, Rhetorical and Association” Let’s have a look at an example of Abstract work, Ballet Mechanique, An experiment in editing things in a completely nonsensical fashion, as far as cause and effect, this is absolutely devoid of narrative. And honestly, it’s creepy to watch. Seth showed us a categorical work by a guy named Jonathon Harris, he used dispersed shots of five second length approximately every minute of a day and uploaded it to the web with some fancy algorithms. Similarly, the Gap teeth women documentary is another categorical piece of non-narrative. Rhetorical non-narrative, I can really only think of Grizzly Man it’s a documentary that leaves me actually more confused about the world than I was going in. It asks so many questions and answers none. Lastly association, this one I don’t quite get.

Non-narrative is a growing form and many believe it is due to a desensitisation to story. I disagree. I don’t think it’s possible for us as a human race to get sick of story. I think it’s simply just a lack of story. A feeling when you go to the cinema and they serve you up a spectacle of explosions and implied meaning and don’t give you anything remotely interesting or well written.