It is a good thing to be given a reading from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction. I have that book! Most of the people who were assigned this reading will have this book! Woot.

Nonetheless, it was as boring then as it was now. As someone who loves the idea and concept of narrative, I find the deconstruction of it disillusioning and annoying. I appreciate the definition of plot and story, and I did the first time I read it as well.

The early definition of narrative is problematic: ‘a chain of events linked by cause and effect and occurring in time and space’. The narrative focused on in Integrated Media is one that attempts to do away with cause and effect: everything is simply linked, not by causality but simply by correlation and juxtaposition. This perhaps infers not narrative but… description. Exploration. It’s important to note that narrative is about events, self-contained and effectual. Hypertext narrative and Korsakow projects aren’t as adept at supporting a cohesive and logical story as say… a film or a novel.

I’d argue that what we are focusing on isn’t narrative at all. In fact, I’ve always argued that. Putting a bunch of words or images together with only a categorical relationship is not crafting a narrative. It’s poetic, but there’s no story there, and the process of making a link? That’s not a story either. That’s essentially saying you can use something else to highlight whatever your subject is, which is true in some cases, but here it seems like you’re saying ‘here’s an orange but we want you to think about a monkey. They’re related because an orange isn’t a monkey’. I’m gonna keep going with this: ‘Here is a bandaid, which is related to religion because it doesn’t have a brain.’

No. This form of association is only existing because you’re asking us to find the narrative. You want us to create stories? We need something akin to a linear progression. A whirlwind of hyperlinks and random elements doesn’t make a story it makes an event, one that might be part of a narrative, but isn’t one without the corresponding causes and effects. I’m not saying it can’t be done in Korsakow, I’m saying that we need a beginning, a middle and an end, even if one of those steps is this model of hypertext we hear so much about. But it’s not the narrative.

The narrative is the start, the middle and the end, together.

A narrative needs to change. That’s the big problem. An orange is never a monkey, unless you have a scientist try to turn it into one and there is your narrative. A bandaid gains sentience and tries to become a pastor, there’s another narrative. Even if the bandaid fucking lies there, used and bloody, as it gains the ability to think and simply ponders what life as a pastor would entail, that is a freaking story.

Images of bandaids and religious paraphenalia isn’t a story, even if the author was sitting there thinking ‘Ah, people will understand how this inanimate object strives to be a part of religious congregation’. That isn’t how it works. The way we have the Korsakow project laid out to us is not a narrative, it’s a message. These bandages and crucifixes would make me wonder about the inherent damage religion causes to itself and others by pretending to be a healing force. I would never pick up on the sentient bandaid finding Jesus. And a message is not a narrative. There’s no progression, only a whole.

Ugh, I’m too impassioned about this I’m gonna stop, but not before I reiterate my annoying point: We are not studying narrative in this subject. We are studying association. We are told to forgo the beginning, the middle and the end, which are the fundamental elements of a narrative; fucking cause and effect.

Done.

There’ll be a video here eventually.

There’s no good reason, I just find them annoying.

No one cares what I think, and I generally don’t really care what other people think. Of course, if the blog’s about something really fascinating to me, i.e. television, then I’ll read it with great enthusiasm, but when it’s about university I’d rather embed a drill bit into my eye socket.

I will deal.

So, long story short I thoroughly enjoyed reading this excerpt, but I didn’t really grasp the relevance.

They’re top class short films, which is relevant, but that’s like having a book called ‘How to Raise Cats’ then just giving us lots of images of kittens being cute. Where’s the process? The thoughts that guided the writing? Why did they script writers choose to do what they did?

One thing that always hits me about short films is how horrid the characters are. I get why, they kinda need to be. We don’t have enough time to establish a fantastic protagonist, we just have five to ten minutes to present an archetype, something easily distinguishable. There’s no time for real character development, only generally a glimmer of an event and a snapshot of its consequences.

The example ‘Vincent’ presents something close to an exception, as it features quite a long story. Starting with the titular character’s childhood before passing over his birth, late teens and early-twenties, this generation of plot points would be difficult to really pull off in a short film, but it’s a strong execution – in writing, anyway.

I just wish there some tips as to how to pull off a similar scope of story with as much success, I mean… what can I take from this without simply plagiarising elements of it?

Maybe I’m just dumb. Maybe I can’t see subtext, or I’m missing something obvious, but it’s weird to give us uncontextualised examples and expect us to understand. I’m just not that smart.

I’m back, ladies and gentlemen, so get excited.

Why am I here?

Who knows/cares.

Integrated media, Film/TV 1, Communication Debates and Approaches and… the other one… True Lies! Yeah, got there in the end.

Anyhow, let’s hope I don’t die.

UGH. So the conversational mode and the hypertext mode seem almost exactly the same, differentiated by inconsequential levels of syntax. I mean, the conversational is clearly a lot broader, and encompasses i-docs far exceeding the hypertext mode, but why have the hypertext mode at all?

I don’t really know what I’m saying.

Surely there’s something more important to the world than creating a new taxonomy for something ultimately irrelevant? I’m just being argumentative, ignore me. If that was really an argument I wouldn’t be spending half an hour reading it and making a blog post.