Narratives and Barratives, most people would tell me, ‘Barrative’ is not a word! but let me tell you something, it is now. In our Week 8 lectorial we were told that Narrative is Basically Cause and Effect. Therefore if i want to change the first letter of Narrative to a B and make it Barrative, isn’t it effectively the cause of me wanting to rhyme effectively creating a new word? We were also showed this video called “We have Decided not to Die” we then were asked to discuss whether or not it was a narrative. Here is a breakdown of my thoughts
How it is a Narrative:
Each scene follows a similar structure: no movment, crazy movment, deadly stunt. It has titles so that we follow a basic story.
How its not:
It does not seem to have much of a conclusion that ties it all together, this seems to leave it open ended, to me this is what really would have made it a narrative, a proper ending.
The reading for this week also outlined some good points, which might further support the idea that this is not in fact a narrative. For example Robert McKee says that a protagonist must have certain motivations and must use them to follow a certain structure of story or resolve a conflict. We briefly looked at this as well in the lectorial by graphing out the emotional intensity of common films such as Shrek and Frozen.
In this short the protagonist does not necessarily have any motivation, the only thing which might be relevant is that they “Have decided not to die” which is only evident because of the title itself, which is a grey area in terms of if we can rely on that to tell the story. There are brief ideas of conflict or narrative explored in this video, when we see a scene, for example the boy enters the building and takes the lift, but there is not a larger more encompassing narrative to tie the scenes together.
Overall, i believe that the short by Daniel Askill has lots of food for thought, and definitely challenges the grey areas around narrative.
McKee, Robert. (1997). ‘The substance of story.’ In Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154.
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