Integrated Media Reading: Week #3
0March 23, 2014 by sharona
The first (and one of the only) textbooks I ever bought for uni was Film Art: An Introduction, from Bordwell and Thompson. I still have it at home just in case, so it was nice to be able to dig it up and read it again.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Print.
I remember doing a lot of talking about narrative in high school media, and this was a nice callback to a lot of the stuff we talked about then.
The relationship between causality, time and space is what makes a narrative what it is. In standard Hollywood films, this relationship will be fairly straightforward, whereas there are plenty of more challenging films which directly challenge these elements.
In regards to plot and story, these two terms are often used interchangeably, and it can be difficult to really separate one from the other. It’s interesting to actually dig into what each of them really refer to. While the set of all the events in a narrative (both explicitly presented and inferred) is the story, the plot describes “everything visibly and audibly present in the film before us” as well as extra material not relevant to the story.
There’s a lot of stuff to look at in this reading, so a few more points I found interesting: characters with and without bodies, non-human cause and effects, messed up temporal order, patterns and abstract form.
Category Integrated Media, readings | Tags: David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, narrative
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