Narrative Theory

OCR will expect candidates to be able to utilise narrative theory with regard to case studies/films/TV texts and production.

• Narrative is the order in which a story is told or plot untangled. It also refers to the style with use of specific archetypes and representations.
• The story is what happens, the substance or content.

Films that use a diverse or non-linear narrative include: Memento, Pulp Fiction, Slumdog Millionaire and Vantage Point. There are also texts like Tom's Midnight Garden and Handmaids Tale.

Films or texts like these bring in a large audience because audiences can relate, engage and escape. Humans dream, imagine and remember. Part of the human condition is that we don't dream nor remember or imagine events in linear order. 'The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts.' Audiences use intertextuality, constantly relating and comparing films or media texts.

Having learned this, we have experimented more in our music video, with a non-linear narrative, using flashbacks and preempting later events early on. This makes it more interesting to watch, and relatable to the audience.

Barthes' Codes - Open and Closed Texts

Barthes was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so.

He said that 'a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can seperate out the colours. He decided that the threads you pull on and try to unravel meaning from are called Narrative Codes.'

Audiences bring psychological, sociological and cultural baggage to a text, so everyone reads it differently. Ambiguity in a text suggests different interpretations or meanings. How and where, or the context of a text, is important too.

Barthes proposed that texts may be 'open' (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on). eg Action Adventure
He decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following ways:

-Simple description/reproduction
-Action Code and Enigma Code(ie Answers & Questions)
-Symbols & Signs
-Points of Cultural Reference

Tvzetan Todorov - equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium

Tvzetan Todorov's conventional narrative structure has five stages:

1. A state of equilibrium is defined

2. Disruption to the equilibrium by a crisis/action

3. The characters recognition that there has been a disruption, setting goals to resolve problem

4. The characters attempt to repair the disruption

5. Reinstatement to the equilibrium, situation resolved, conclusion announced.

For example “The Piano” has a linear narrative. The equilibrium is before Ada goes to New Zealand the audience assume that there is an order, the whites are taking control of the Maoris and taking the land, Stewart has the land and Baines has gone native and is unconventional. The disequilibrium comes with Ada's arrival in New Zealand with her daughter, being uprooted and moved and problems with the piano - a metaphor for art, the imagination and Ada's voice. The new equilibrium is when the audience assume order is restored, Baines is gone, Stewart has more land, Ada and her daughter have left, Stewarts attitude to marriage has changed but the piano is at the bottom of the sea.

Claude Levi-Strauss

After studying hundreds of myths and legends from around the world, Levi-Strauss found that we make sense of the world, people and events by seeing and using binary oppositions everywhere. He proposed that all narratives are organised around the conflict between binary opposites.

Examples of binary opposites include: good vs evil; black vs white; boy vs girl; young vs old; protagonist vs antagonist; strong vs weak; first world vs third world; humanity vs technology etc..

Levi-Strauss observed that narrative can only end on a resolution of conflicts between opposition.

Male Gaze in Anchorman

Music Video; First Draft

The Male Gaze

The male gaze is a feminist theory proposed by Laura Mulvey, known for writing the seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1973. In this essay Mulvey wrote about the objectification of women within media and that due to the high amount of male workers within the media, women are repeatedly being perceived and shown as objects of sexual fantasy. She argues that the passive role of women in films provides visual pleasure through scopophilia - 'voyeurism as the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity'.

She writes: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning."

Whilst Laura Mulvey's paper is an important feminist film theory, she also looks at voyeuristic ideas and ways of watching the cinema and identifying with actors on screen.
She identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. 'The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.'

Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' was written during the time of second-wave feminism, concerned with achieving equality between gender in the workplace and eliminating stereotypes and traditional gender roles. Mulvey argues that in order to achieve equal representation for women in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are, lacking sexual objectification. She therefore calls for destruction of modern film structure as a way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, by creating distance between the female character and the male spectator.

The male gaze can be seen in some films we've looked at, such as Sin City, American Beauty, Casino Royale, Fast and the Furious and The Piano.

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