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.