Fish Tank & WNTTAK: Narrative & Film Theories
Fish Tank:
Narrative & ideology:
Fish Tank explores aspects of 'growing up' within a social realist narrative
We Need To Talk About Kevin explores families and the 'secrets' their harbour
Section B: British film since '95:
Additional notes on Narrative:
- Concept of narrative largely concerned with story of a film
- Several distinctions need to be made between narrative, story & plot
- Narrative: Largely the practise or art of telling stories; a representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values
- Storyline: plot of film or other narrative form
- Plot: Main events of narrative form, devised & presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence
- Study of narrative is one way of examining the story of a film & exploring how it is structured, ordered & why this has been done
- Narrative asks the viewer to consider whose viewpoint were experiencing the story & whether this has an effect on what we see, hear & experience
- Tightly aligned to editing, narrative is complex & highly ambiguous aspect of film studies
- Film poetics under the sub-heading of narrative
- Poetics: study of how things are made, process of selection & construction. Elements of film are selected & combined in ways that construct a shot, a sequence, why did the filmmaker make this choice at this moment in order to produce a particular effect?
Study of Narrative also incorporates genre:
- Genre can be defined as a style or category of film whereby, socially-agreed tropes & conventions help to depict categories
- Genre is eminently fluid & often a film straddles the distinction of many genres
- In exploring & analysing genre, a useful starting point is to typically identify key characteristics of genres. More commonly referred to as 'Repertoire of Elements' (see genre theorist Steve Neale)
- Advised to look at the films' screenplays as part of their study of narrative, particularly in their study of character & dialogue
Study of Narrative looks at:
- Representation of time
- Use of narration/voiceover
- How dialogue propels the narrative
- Creation of drama or action
- Character development - heroes & villains, ambiguity
- Character alignment & identification
- How narratives present an ideological viewpoint
- Enigma codes
- Generic narratives & formulas
- Binary oppositions
Example questions:
- How is time manipulated in the film?
- How is the story told through narrative techniques? (Flashbacks/forwards, pov, chronology, enigma, voiceover)
- What character types are created?
- Who are the audience encouraged to identify with/dislike? What are the ideological implications of this?
- Is the film linear or non-linear/chronological/multi strand?
- Does the text follow a conventional equilibrium/disruption or re-equilibrium structure or does it do something more unconventional?
- How are drama & tension created?
- Does the film's genre shape its narrative?
- Film poetics: What is the shot by shot relationship? How have the shots been edited together & what is the impact of this?
Required to have an understanding of:
- Formalism (distinction between story & plot)
- Structuralism (conception of binary opposites)
Formalism:
- Looks at a film's structure & recognises the difference between the story & how it's told through plot
- The story is what is depicted, the plot is how
- Story: Events of the narrative
- Plot: How the story is presented to us
- We Need To Talk About Kevin is the story of Kevin from birth to adulthood. However the non-linear narrative structure of events, seen from Kevin's mothers point of view provides a very different experience for audiences.
- Theory focused on the synthesis of technical elements of film (e.g. shot composition, editing, sound design)
- Formalism concerned with style & how it communicates ideas, emotions & themes (rather than concentrating on the themes of a work itself0
Structuralism:
- Assumes that narratives are structured in a binary way
- 'Binary oppositions' are concepts that appear opposite but actually need each other to define their meaning. BO often used in film & other narratives to achieve a narrative or aesthetic tension
- To analyse a narrative by drawing up binaries can help map the key ideas and themes of a film, & reveal it's ideological work
- Most interesting films often have a 'space between', a grey zone where the film seems to negotiate between left and right binary. These spaces can sometimes reveal contradictions at the heart of the film
- 'Cinema is a set of syntagmatic relations - that is, of universal rules, a set of relations that could be described as the grammar of film'
- Levi-Strauss theorised since all cultures are products of the human brain, there must be, beneath the surface, features that are common to all
- 'Structures' that produce meaning in film are auteur, linguistic, social & institutional. Doesn't take into account spectatorship or ideology
- Structuralism attempted to deromanticise the filmmaker as auteur & apply a more scientific approach to uncover the underlying structures of film
Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition:
- Narrative tension based on opposition or conflict. Can be as simple as 2 characters fighting but more often functions at an ideological level
Examples of Binary Opposites:
- Good vs Evil
- Black vs White
- Boy vs Girl
- Peace vs War
- Civilised vs Savage
- Democracy vs Dictatorship
- First World vs Third World
- Domestic vs foreign/alien
- Articulate vs inarticulate
- Young vs Old
- Man vs Nature
- Protagonist vs Antagonist
- Action vs Inaction
- Motivator vs Observer
- Empowered vs Victim
- Man vs Woman
- Good Looking vs Ugly
- Strong vs Weak
- Decisive vs Indecisive
- East vs West
- Humanity vs Technology
- Ignorance vs Wisdom
Conflict in screenwriting:
- At very core of every piece of film/TV is conflict. Everyone getting along = boring
- As a scriptwriter you have to inject conflict into your script to keep action moving = keeps audience interested
- Most importance piece of conflict is always conflict between main character's success versus failure of achieving their ultimate goal
- Think of each scene as a a mini-story where your main character has a goal, it doesn't have to be their ultimate goal, where obstacles are pushed into their path to stop them achieving their goal
- In most scenes, the character will be able to overcome these obstacles and achieve their goal with a few exceptions
Two types of conflict:
- Inner Conflict
- Outer Conflict
Inner Conflict:
- The emotion hang-ups & neurouses we all have
- Whether its obvious (e.g. a person refusing to swim as their dad drowned) or something more subtle, inner conflict is often the deeper/darker side of a character
- Often hinders character from developing as a person & achieving their goal in a less obvious way than a physical force
Outer Conflict:
- Outer conflict are the obstacles which confront your character & attempt to stop them achieving their goal
- These can range from the character's relationships to freakish zombie mutants
Fish Tank:
How binary oppositions & conflict operate in Fish Tank?
- Dramatic tension centres around conflict; Mia's struggle for freedom conflicts with her environment & circumstances
- Joanne's struggles as a single mum & her need for love/happiness conflict with her role as a mother & leads to neglect
- Narrative patterning indicated in cinematography when Mia & then Joanne are framed in a wide-shot, looking outside balcony
- Connor's own secrets & circumstances lead to the ambivalent role he plays in Mia's life -> creates psychological intensity & insight
- Binary oppositions emerge through Connor's presence & the absence of Mia's real dad
- Music becomes a pivotal narrative device in developing plot & character (Mia goes to an abandoned flat to express herself when dancing)
- When Mia, Tyler & Joanne dance at the end, music contributes to the narrative's attempt to bring resolution
We Need To Talk About Kevin:
- Use of flashbacks & parallelism in structure of the film can be usefully explored. Film begins in aftermath of massacre, then flashes back to events leading up to the massacre (including flashbacks to beginnings of Franklin & Eva's relationship). Complex inter-relationship of narrative timeline culminates in massacre itself & flashes forward to meeting between Eva + Kevin one year after the killings. Effect of this complex structuring of time in the plot can be usefully explored by considering opportunities it affords the storyteller for showing parallels between characters & events, and raising questions about cause & effect
- How exposition of the narrative occurs in the film can be an interesting source of inquiry. Presented with fractured elements of a story at the beginning we have to piece together with little indication of how to organise these into a chronological framework of time & space. Difficulty of doing this is compounded by a lack of expositional dialogue & conventional establish of narrative setting. First 3 scenes are net curtains blowing in wind, tomato festival & Eva waking up which all occur in very different places & times (which we discover later) but how we can organise these scenes into a story is restricted from us until much later in the film
- Eva's & Kevin's characters provide many sources for inquiry, particularly in their position within the narrative. Questions about who is the film's protagonist & antagonist, who is the 'centre' or initiator of the drama & how we're supposed to respond to characters is complex & ambiguous at times. Complexity of character identification & function within the narrative is further complicated by use of mirroring. Characters made to look like each other & often display similar expressions & body language. Frequent graphic matches force a further comparison which suggests characters that are connected in more ways than simply a mother-son relationship
Narrative & ideology:
Fish Tank explores aspects of 'growing up' within a social realist narrative
We Need To Talk About Kevin explores families and the 'secrets' their harbour
Section B: British film since '95:
Additional notes on Narrative:
- Concept of narrative largely concerned with story of a film
- Several distinctions need to be made between narrative, story & plot
- Narrative: Largely the practise or art of telling stories; a representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values
- Storyline: plot of film or other narrative form
- Plot: Main events of narrative form, devised & presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence
- Study of narrative is one way of examining the story of a film & exploring how it is structured, ordered & why this has been done
- Narrative asks the viewer to consider whose viewpoint were experiencing the story & whether this has an effect on what we see, hear & experience
- Tightly aligned to editing, narrative is complex & highly ambiguous aspect of film studies
- Film poetics under the sub-heading of narrative
- Poetics: study of how things are made, process of selection & construction. Elements of film are selected & combined in ways that construct a shot, a sequence, why did the filmmaker make this choice at this moment in order to produce a particular effect?
Study of Narrative also incorporates genre:
- Genre can be defined as a style or category of film whereby, socially-agreed tropes & conventions help to depict categories
- Genre is eminently fluid & often a film straddles the distinction of many genres
- In exploring & analysing genre, a useful starting point is to typically identify key characteristics of genres. More commonly referred to as 'Repertoire of Elements' (see genre theorist Steve Neale)
- Advised to look at the films' screenplays as part of their study of narrative, particularly in their study of character & dialogue
Study of Narrative looks at:
- Representation of time
- Use of narration/voiceover
- How dialogue propels the narrative
- Creation of drama or action
- Character development - heroes & villains, ambiguity
- Character alignment & identification
- How narratives present an ideological viewpoint
- Enigma codes
- Generic narratives & formulas
- Binary oppositions
Example questions:
- How is time manipulated in the film?
- How is the story told through narrative techniques? (Flashbacks/forwards, pov, chronology, enigma, voiceover)
- What character types are created?
- Who are the audience encouraged to identify with/dislike? What are the ideological implications of this?
- Is the film linear or non-linear/chronological/multi strand?
- Does the text follow a conventional equilibrium/disruption or re-equilibrium structure or does it do something more unconventional?
- How are drama & tension created?
- Does the film's genre shape its narrative?
- Film poetics: What is the shot by shot relationship? How have the shots been edited together & what is the impact of this?
Required to have an understanding of:
- Formalism (distinction between story & plot)
- Structuralism (conception of binary opposites)
Formalism:
- Looks at a film's structure & recognises the difference between the story & how it's told through plot
- The story is what is depicted, the plot is how
- Story: Events of the narrative
- Plot: How the story is presented to us
- We Need To Talk About Kevin is the story of Kevin from birth to adulthood. However the non-linear narrative structure of events, seen from Kevin's mothers point of view provides a very different experience for audiences.
- Theory focused on the synthesis of technical elements of film (e.g. shot composition, editing, sound design)
- Formalism concerned with style & how it communicates ideas, emotions & themes (rather than concentrating on the themes of a work itself0
Structuralism:
- Assumes that narratives are structured in a binary way
- 'Binary oppositions' are concepts that appear opposite but actually need each other to define their meaning. BO often used in film & other narratives to achieve a narrative or aesthetic tension
- To analyse a narrative by drawing up binaries can help map the key ideas and themes of a film, & reveal it's ideological work
- Most interesting films often have a 'space between', a grey zone where the film seems to negotiate between left and right binary. These spaces can sometimes reveal contradictions at the heart of the film
- 'Cinema is a set of syntagmatic relations - that is, of universal rules, a set of relations that could be described as the grammar of film'
- Levi-Strauss theorised since all cultures are products of the human brain, there must be, beneath the surface, features that are common to all
- 'Structures' that produce meaning in film are auteur, linguistic, social & institutional. Doesn't take into account spectatorship or ideology
- Structuralism attempted to deromanticise the filmmaker as auteur & apply a more scientific approach to uncover the underlying structures of film
Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition:
- Narrative tension based on opposition or conflict. Can be as simple as 2 characters fighting but more often functions at an ideological level
Examples of Binary Opposites:
- Good vs Evil
- Black vs White
- Boy vs Girl
- Peace vs War
- Civilised vs Savage
- Democracy vs Dictatorship
- First World vs Third World
- Domestic vs foreign/alien
- Articulate vs inarticulate
- Young vs Old
- Man vs Nature
- Protagonist vs Antagonist
- Action vs Inaction
- Motivator vs Observer
- Empowered vs Victim
- Man vs Woman
- Good Looking vs Ugly
- Strong vs Weak
- Decisive vs Indecisive
- East vs West
- Humanity vs Technology
- Ignorance vs Wisdom
Conflict in screenwriting:
- At very core of every piece of film/TV is conflict. Everyone getting along = boring
- As a scriptwriter you have to inject conflict into your script to keep action moving = keeps audience interested
- Most importance piece of conflict is always conflict between main character's success versus failure of achieving their ultimate goal
- Think of each scene as a a mini-story where your main character has a goal, it doesn't have to be their ultimate goal, where obstacles are pushed into their path to stop them achieving their goal
- In most scenes, the character will be able to overcome these obstacles and achieve their goal with a few exceptions
Two types of conflict:
- Inner Conflict
- Outer Conflict
Inner Conflict:
- The emotion hang-ups & neurouses we all have
- Whether its obvious (e.g. a person refusing to swim as their dad drowned) or something more subtle, inner conflict is often the deeper/darker side of a character
- Often hinders character from developing as a person & achieving their goal in a less obvious way than a physical force
Outer Conflict:
- Outer conflict are the obstacles which confront your character & attempt to stop them achieving their goal
- These can range from the character's relationships to freakish zombie mutants
Fish Tank:
How binary oppositions & conflict operate in Fish Tank?
- Dramatic tension centres around conflict; Mia's struggle for freedom conflicts with her environment & circumstances
- Joanne's struggles as a single mum & her need for love/happiness conflict with her role as a mother & leads to neglect
- Narrative patterning indicated in cinematography when Mia & then Joanne are framed in a wide-shot, looking outside balcony
- Connor's own secrets & circumstances lead to the ambivalent role he plays in Mia's life -> creates psychological intensity & insight
- Binary oppositions emerge through Connor's presence & the absence of Mia's real dad
- Music becomes a pivotal narrative device in developing plot & character (Mia goes to an abandoned flat to express herself when dancing)
- When Mia, Tyler & Joanne dance at the end, music contributes to the narrative's attempt to bring resolution
We Need To Talk About Kevin:
- Use of flashbacks & parallelism in structure of the film can be usefully explored. Film begins in aftermath of massacre, then flashes back to events leading up to the massacre (including flashbacks to beginnings of Franklin & Eva's relationship). Complex inter-relationship of narrative timeline culminates in massacre itself & flashes forward to meeting between Eva + Kevin one year after the killings. Effect of this complex structuring of time in the plot can be usefully explored by considering opportunities it affords the storyteller for showing parallels between characters & events, and raising questions about cause & effect
- How exposition of the narrative occurs in the film can be an interesting source of inquiry. Presented with fractured elements of a story at the beginning we have to piece together with little indication of how to organise these into a chronological framework of time & space. Difficulty of doing this is compounded by a lack of expositional dialogue & conventional establish of narrative setting. First 3 scenes are net curtains blowing in wind, tomato festival & Eva waking up which all occur in very different places & times (which we discover later) but how we can organise these scenes into a story is restricted from us until much later in the film
- Eva's & Kevin's characters provide many sources for inquiry, particularly in their position within the narrative. Questions about who is the film's protagonist & antagonist, who is the 'centre' or initiator of the drama & how we're supposed to respond to characters is complex & ambiguous at times. Complexity of character identification & function within the narrative is further complicated by use of mirroring. Characters made to look like each other & often display similar expressions & body language. Frequent graphic matches force a further comparison which suggests characters that are connected in more ways than simply a mother-son relationship
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