Narrative Theory in Film

This essay will discuss three important thinkers and creative artists that have made a significant contribution to my research topic in the field of filmdance, film theory and subjective camera technique. The three key people are Christian Metz (French film theorist), Sally Potter (British film maker and choreographer) and Maya Deren, (Russian/American film theorist, experimental film maker, dancer and poet). In my critical analyses of Metz, I will specifically look at his theories on the musings of Pablo Pasolini, an Italian filmmaker and critique of narrative cinematic language, and Metz’s critical dialogue with Pasolini’s theorem, im-segni.

2015

Some films are multi-plot narratives operating as a network of related events played out by a large number of core characters. Since these characters are all protagonists in their own right, this results in a complex form of storytelling that can be used for dramatic purposes as well as for comedy. In both cases, however, there is a sort of play at stake here because the screenwriter is forced to mingle them all in a single film, thus stressing the storytelling over the story told. Enter the director, centre stage. The story on paper, i.e. the script, has to gain another life as characters are portrayed by actors and the game of shooting begins. Here the director, by using certain filmic techniques that reinforce his/her own role as puppet master, adds another layer of narration to the film, thus further stressing the storytelling and its playful, although not necessarily joyful, nature. In the film Happy Endings - written and directed by Don Roos, 2005, USA - the scrambling and re-scrambling of character’s lives in one single multiple and complex plot, via the art of the filmmakers and the craft of the actors invested in their roles, reveals itself to be not only playful but joyful as well. The film is a comedy where the events are doubly enunciated: as actions portrayed by people, and as text written large over the image as the actions evolve. Thus, the director writes himself onscreen as an artist just as is he is literally writing his characters bios and convolutions. What a playful and thoroughly self-conscious storytelling this is, reminiscent of some of Woody Allen’s masterpieces.

Rozenberg , 2011

This book puts into focus the tendency for increasingly complex forms of narration in post-1990s cinema. I argue that, because of the fragmentation and nonlinearity that contemporary complex films display—in all three narrative dimensions of time, causality and space—it is not enough to approach them solely as complex narratives. The notion of narrative holds onto an idea of coherency, wholeness and causal-temporal linearity of the story, against the backdrop of which narrative ‘complexity’ is defined. Instead, this book suggests a radically new framework for the analysis of contemporary narrative films, a framework able to shed light to the processes of organization that nonlinear systems follow. Tools from complexity theory are thus derived in order to address complex films as complex systems, and their dynamic forms of textual and cognitive organization.

2025

This 107 pp guide offers a toolbox approach to narratological concepts and models and shows how to put them to work in the analysis of (mostly verbal) narratives. The definitions are based on a number of classical introductions – specifically, Genette (1972, 1983), Chatman (1978), Lanser (1981), Stanzel (1979), Bal (1985), and Fludernik (1996). The guide also contains an extended exposition of the author's own theory of Constructivist Focalization (ch3.5). Changes include a more readable font, simplified paragraph numbering, updated links and references, a chapter on Stanzel's typological circle (ch3.6), and two additional case studies.

1994

With its persistent techno beat, its dynamic title character with her flamingly red-dyed hair, its kinesthetic appeal, its abundance of visual modalities, its temporal complexity, Run Lola Run (Lola rennt 1998, Tykwer) can be regarded a representative of the transformations in spectatorial address witnessed in contemporary 'puzzle-films' (cf. Buckland 2009), 'neuro-images' (cf. Pisters 2012) or 'complex narratives' (cf. Simons 2010). In Cinema 2 (2005 [1985]) Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that the Bergsonian conception of memory had found its expression in modern(ist) cinema, and encapsulated this in the dictum: "Memory is not in us, it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory (Deleuze 2005 [1985], 95)." In this paper it is argued that contemporary cinema does something similar; however, this time with an emphasis on narration. No longer offering 'illusions of reality' but rather 'realities of illusion' (cf. Pisters 2012), it is argued that with contemporary 'complex' cinema narrative is not in us, but it is we who move in a Being-narrative, a world-narrative. Such a conception of 'complex narratives' open up for a productive encounter between the often polarised positions of Deleuzian film-philosophy and cognitive film science. Yet, it prompts a departure away from the computational 'classical sandwich' conception of cognition (cf. Hurley 1998), which governs the cognitive-formalist assumption that the spectator's comprehension of the narrative is "theoretically separable from his or her emotional responses (Bordwell 1985, 30)." In order to promote a more embodied conception of spectatorship a reconstruction of the concept of the fabula is proposed. In short, rather than regarding the fabula as a coherent, linear and causally ordered representation of the narrative, it shall be understood as a dynamic and enactive tool, which spectators utilise to navigate narrative environments. It is thus assumed that narratives are best understood as complex systems; i.e. that a narrative cannot be properly understood as merely the sum of its parts or 'modules' once these have been broken down and temporally reorganised according to a causal-linear logic of the fabula. As a means of comprehending the dynamical interplay between the cinematic material, and our cognitive and affective engagement with this, the paper follows John Protevi's (2010) proposal to combine Deleuzian philosophy, embodied cognitive (neuro)science, and dynamical system theory. The hope is that this amalgamation may support an enhanced understanding of how 'complex narratives' such as Run Lola Run prompt an embodied and enactive cinematic experience.

Frames Cinema Journal

Warren Buckland's monograph Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling is a succinct look at the intricacies of narrative, narration, and other critical storytelling devices in film. The author provides terminology, concepts, and properties that enable the reader to unlock how stories are told cinematically making what is often rendered an opaque process by filmmakers, easy to comprehend. The book, is part of the Short Cuts series, that provides introductions to a myriad of topics in Film Studies for both film scholars and those simply interested in film. Indeed, Buckland's book in addition to being a key scholarly text, is also an indispensable tool for the screenwriter. The clarity it provides on topic of narrative, would strengthen any writer's knowledge of the mechanics of storytelling. Starting with the history of early cinema, in chapter one, Buckland takes the reader on an immersive dive into early modes of narration-from "intertitles, primitive narrators, voyeurcharacters" (8) and how they "contribute to the transition from the cinema of attractions to the cinema of narrative integration" (8). A scene from The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) explores the tension between the director's "attempt to develop a narrative scene" (6) and lingering notions of "attraction" found in early cinema (ibid).

Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016

Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies-narrational structure and how it impacts us-to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts-setup, complication, development, and climax-with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated sty...