Narrative Notes

➞ A story is a series of events that tells us what happens. A story has themes and motifs, such as romance, family, money, or power. One story can have multiple narratives depending who tells it. 
➞ A narrative is how the story is told. Humans need a narrative to understand a story. It's created to appeal to an audience and puts themes into context, underlining what is important, and who the hero is. 

"...the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents; for tragedy is a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness - and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. ...it is their characters indeed, that make men what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse." - Aristotle 

• Successful stories require change, and a new equilibrium to be established at the end. 
• When analysing narratives, we look at

1. Genre
2. Character 
3. Form
4. Context

• Narratives do not take place in real time.
• The same story with a different narrative can completely change how you view the moral e.g. the Hiroshima bombings from an American or Japanese point of view. 
• Narrative Theory is about looking at the conventions and devices linking a series of events together and how we, as an audience, interpret them. 
• As the viewer watches a film, they pick up cues, recall information, anticipate what will follow, and generally participate in the creation of the film's form. 
• The ending has the task of satisfying or cheating the expectations.
• The ending may also activate memory by cueing the spectator to review earlier events, possibly in a new light e.g. Shut up and Dance from the forth series of Black Mirror. 

➞ Plot vs Story

• The term plot (sometimes referred to as Discourse) is used to describe the events on screen and how they are organised/presented.
• The term story is used to describe the whole set of events in a narrative that we bring to the plot in order to make sense of it. 
• The story world is often referred to as the diegetic world of the film, the imaginary world that we enter into when we set out to watch the film. Rules are different there.
• The plot may also include non‑diegetic material that is part of the plot but not part of the story world. E.g. music and voiceover elements 

➞ Technical Code

• The actual making of a visual narrative e.g. Sound, camera angles, design, and editing.
• Colour theory important, tied in with Symbolic Code. 
• Technical Codes can be used to cheat time, such as time stamps or location names on screen in each new scene. The audience fills in the blanks themselves, so we don't have to see every action the characters make. 
• The director can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in a certain order, to build a picture in our minds. We automatically link what is happening in one shot with what happens in those either side of it, as this is what happens in real life. 

➞ Verbal Code

• How language is used
• Written and spoken
• Reliant on actors and script writing 
• Different styles of Verbal Code apply to different narratives, compare a documentary to an action film. 

➞ Symbolic Code

• Clues within narrative to larger points 
• Uses the motifs and themes off the narrative to tell us about characters and events without having to spoon feed us information
• E.g. a character with an old, broken down car is more likely to be struggling financially 

➞ Structure 

• The beginning, middle, and end
• Todorov's Equilibrium; Conventional narratives are structured in five stages 
1. Equilibrium
2. Distribution
3. Recognition
4. Attempt to repair
5. Reinstatement of new equilibrium 


• 'Classic Hollywood Movies' have three acts
• All Shakespearean plays have five acts 
• In any movie there is a) the strict chronological order in which events occur b) the order in which each of the main characters finds out about these events 
  
  a) shows story, b) shows plot construction. 
  
  Identifying who is telling this story is a vital question to be asked when analysing any media text. The narrator will always
  • reveal the events which make up the story
  • mediate those events for the audience
  • evaluate those events for the audience
  The narrator also tends to position the audience into a particular relationship with the characters on the screen.

• The Narrator is not necessarily impartial, however. Audiences and students should remember that if the narrator is a character within the story, they can be subject to prejudice and let their own feelings sway how they present the tale (E.g. Nick from The Great Gatsby)

➞ Characters

• The cast of individuals that make up the story
• The story is seen through their eyes, though they do not necessarily have to be heroes to tell the story. 
• They can be side characters (Red from The Shawshank Redemption), impartial (The god-like narrator from The Road) or the villain (Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars movies)

➞ Propp's Fairy Tale Characters

• Analysed over a hundred folk tales from different cultures.
• There are seven character types that appear in the majority of stories.
• All characters serve some kind of narrative function.

1. The Hero - The character the story is about. We root for them to win, often an underdog.
2. The Villain - Opposes the hero, strives to beat them. Often wishes harm on others.
3. The Donor/Enabler - Gives the hero something that will help them on their quest. A mentor.
4. The Helper - Often a sidekick, helps the hero complete their tasks.
5. The Princess - The sought-after person. Not always a woman.
6. The False Hero - A character who pretends to help the hero only to betray them.
7. The Dispatcher - Sends the hero out on their quest, gives them their role.
8. The Father - A figure of authority who rewards the hero for their brave deeds. 

• He theorised all narratives have a share of the same 31 conventions

➞ Narrative Conflict 

• Conflict is caused by opposing forces. 
• Without some form of conflict, there's no story.

➞ Binary Opposition 

• Levi Strauss 
• All narratives are driven by some kind of conflict. Eg, Good vs Evil, Fear vs Confidence
• The narrative can only end when the conflict comes to some kind of a conclusion.

➞ Narrative Codes

• The Narrative of Events (Someone is shot and pushed into a lake)
• The Narrative of Drama (An emotional argument in the rain) 

➞ R. Barthes  

• Hermeneutic Codes = Enigma (Makes the audience think i.e. Questions)
• Proairetic Codes = Action (Moves the narrative forward i.e. Answers) 
• These codes were devised with literature in mind. 

➞ Allan Cameron 

• Movies are becoming more complex 

1. Anachronic - Flashbacks and forwards. Not necessarily linear.
2. Forking Path - Alternative versions of a story within the same narrative. 
3. Episodic - A collection of stories joined by a common theme. 
4. Split screen - Spacial rather then temporal. 

➞ Narrative Location

• Locations can be geographical (such as London) or mythic (such as The Wild West)
• Elaborate sets and a series of establishing shots are often used to convince the audience that the movie is in, say, the Kaiser Building, when in reality it was filmed in a studio with sets done up to look like offices. 
• Locations are tired closely with genre (A sci fi movie in space) and can become cliche if not handled with care (a saloon in a western that goes quiet when a main character enters) 

➞ Narrative Image 

• The marketing of a film. The film’s image or identity, and how it is branded. 
• It comes from the direct publicity surrounding a film (ie its marketing – the poster, trailer, video release etc) and also from word of mouth. 
• It particularly draws on the generic qualities of the film. 

• But the narrative image also centres around the idea of difference and originality. This comes in the form of the narrative enigma. 
• The film’s publicity has to encourage the audience into asking questions about the film, and must intrigue the audience enough to want to know the answers. They will only be able to do this if they pay to go and see the film. This is the enigma – the mystery surrounding the film.

• So the narrative image is a promise – a promise to the audience that the film will deliver the answers. 
• Often the narrative image is deliberately misleading, in order to widen the target audience – the core audience are encouraged to go and see a film that conforms to expectations, but are shocked by unexpected breaks with convention that may have put them off if they had known about it beforehand.

➞ Fabula and Syuzhet

• Russian terms used to describe the narrative construct. 
• Fabula = The raw material
• Syuzhet = The way that material is organised
• Simply old, or alternative, terms for 'Story' and 'Narrative' 
• Sound good in an exam