The audience will judge the writers and directors ability to successfully tell a story on the screen and when the audience refer to ‘going to see a film’ they always mean going to see a narrative film- a film that tells a story. Narratives are existent throughout media and society; they appear for example in television shows, novels, plays, production, comic books and even commercials (The love story of Rhonda and Katut). Narrative however are most commonly found in fiction film and they appear in all basic types of films such as documentaries, experimental and avant-garde films, animated films and short films. To analyse narrative in a deeper form, audiences can consider narrative to be a chain of events linked by cause and effects and occurring in time and space. In Mystery Road (2013) a crime, mystery, thriller from Australia.

In a hypothetical film the story is the chain of events in chronological order. In an outback town, Jay Swan, an Indigenous cowboy detective, returns home to solve the murder of a teenage Indigenous girl whose body is found under the highway trucking route out of town. Jay is alienated from both the white-dominated police force and the Indigenous community, including his teenage daughter, whom he discovers is connected to the murdered girl.

The characters in all film narratives create cause and effects through the choices that lead to conflict and consequences. For example the audience expectation that the white policeman are corrupt is through their ridiculous hours doing “intelligence”(cause) and the effects being the drug bust and the shoot-out in the final which reveals some of the cops were collaborating with drug dealers. These patterns are put in place by the director so that the audience clearly see the character development and understand the story and can invest in it, more importantly they can understand the patterns. The characters will follow the usual faits of a complication or conflict and the characters particularly the protagonist will undergo some sort of transformation that will either hinder or enable them to pursue their goals.

 

Cause and their effects are basic to narrative, but they take place in time. As audiences watch a film, they construct the story time on the basis of what the plot presents. Temporal order is how events are sequenced, where the filmmakers have the free will to present events out of story order. In Mystery Road, there is connecting shots and matching shots for example the recurring edit of the bridge appears more than once, however Mystery Road doesn’t use flashbacks say for example like Shawshank does with the repetition of Andy Dufresne’s night of his escape. Temporal duration relates to how long an event takes. For example in Zodiac (2007) it outlines when weeks, months or years has passed through the use of text titles. Through elliptical edits especially in Mystery Road the transitional drives which are assumed to have taken place, eating, walking between locations etc are all omitted and elliptical edits can allow the real time story on screen to speed up. Temporal Frequency is how often the audience see’s or hears an event. Most commonly like in Mystery Road the story event is presented only once in the plot, however it isn’t non existent that a single story event may appear twice or even more. This increased frequency may allow the audience to see the same event in different ways.

The types of conflicts that occur in films are man v man, man v himself, man v nature, man v machine, man v society and man v supernatural.

Diegetic element are everything that exists in the world of the film, for example the characters, the police vehicles, the weapons and the events. The non-diegetic elements on the other hand are within the film but not within the film’s world, such as voice overs or in the scenario of Mystery Road the soundtracks over the top of the action, the characters in the world of the film are unaware of these elements.

Overall Mystery Road follows a chronological order of events which through the corruption of white police personnel and the revealing investigation of honest indigenous policeman Jay. It follows a traditional narrative structure, with a complication, character development and a resolution.