Week 8 Lectorial Reflection
Whenever I approach creating something my first thought is “Where is the story?”. I like creating a narrative because our existence is based on story, our everyday life is ruled by people searching for their part in a larger story. For Project Brief 3 I book-ended the portrait with Keegan fixing his hair, creating a narrative framing device to explore his personality, from him sitting on the stool to getting off it, having gone through a change. The audience view him as most people usually don’t, without his hair straightened. They also get to know him through other people’s point of view, as well as seeing him with his hair done up. When they see him get off the stool, they realise they have seen a private part of his life as well has having pieced together his personality as he created his preferred facade.
Whenever I watch a film and I find a plot hole, I like to create a reasonable excuse for why that exists. Even creating a narrative between two seemingly unconnected events or people/characters is something fun I do when I am bored. So approaching Daniel Askill’s film We Have Decided Not To Die and trying to see if there was a narrative aspects to it was an engaging exercise for me.
Some narrative aspects that may exists are
- Title cards create a linear story
- Conclusion cross-cutting between the three characters connects their stories
- People as central figures helps audience connect to them
- How they arrived at the situations/backstory
- Movement could connotative pain and struggle and narrative can stem from character suffering
- Thematic connection, patterns of representation
- Different places create a journey
- Parallel events
- Title gives film causality and character motivation
Jenny had the task of finding non-narrative aspects of the film and she found
- No obvious causality
- No character development
- No clear diegetic plotline
- No clear linear events tying scenes together
- Graphic matches to make art, not story
- Lack of cohesion
- Non representation (something not explicitly said can mean it is not a narrative element)
- Lack of conclusion/sense of closure
- No character motivation
- People as props not characters
This exercise highlights how each piece of cinema, and even art in general, is subjective to an individual and approaching a film from a different point of view than your usual one can open your eyes to a whole new interpretation.
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