Research: Narrative theory - Ms Begum

Narrative theory

What is narrative & why is it important to audiences?

- Narrative is a storyline that is used and followed throughout a film. It includes everything that goes on in the movie and creates more meaning towards the audience. A narrative should be understood easily by the audience unless it is deliberately altered to cause confusion. A narrative is essentially what happen in the film and how it happens.

 

The four elements that allows the audience to find meaning from are:

- The connotation and denotation: this allows the audience to read between the line to give true meaning of a scene, object or emotion towards the viewers.

- Genre: this shows how conventional it is and what makes it conventional genre-wise.

- The structure: this allows the audience to understand from the start, middle and end without getting confused.

- The characters: giving the audience meaning of the narrative and understands the characters.

 

PROPP - Film as fairy tale

- Propp is a theorist that came up with an idea of creating film with a narrative that determined by the fairy tale characters. Characters have a narrative function, they provide a structure for the text.

 

PROPP's characters:

- The hero

- The villain

- The donor

- The dispatcher

- The false hero

- The helper

- The princess

- Her father (the king)

 

Stage 1: The complication (the hero plans action against the villain)

Stage 2: The transference (the hero reacts to the donor)

Stage 3: The struggle (the villain has to be overcome)

Stage 4: The return (the hero arrives home and is not recognised)

Stage 5: The recognition (The false hero or villain is unmasked)

 

TODOROV

- Todorov is a theorist that came up with an idead of creating a film with a narrative that have a clear structure of a start, middle and end which he named equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium. This type of narrative allows the audience to understand the structure of the movie and have a clear understanding of what's going to occurs and how will it end.

 

TODOROV's theory:

- Equilibrium (start): how the characters appear stable at the beginning.

- Disequilibrium (middle): something disrupting happens and a change occurs which needs to be resolved.

- New equilibrium (end): usually disruption is sorted and the narrative is closed.

 

Understanding the narrative stages:

- A recognition that the disorder has occured.

- An attempt to repair the damage of t he disruption.

 

ARISTOTLE - the importance of plot

- Aristotle is a theorist that came up with an idea of a narrative that have a beginning, a middle and an end. the events must casually relate to one another as being either necessary of probable.

- It is important to arouse emotion from the audience and this is mainly within tragedy (fear&emotion).

 

BARTHES - semiology within narrative

- Barthes is a theorist that came up with an idea of narrative that can be define by using the five following things:

1. Action - understanding and resolution is understood by the action seen.

2. Enigma - reases the audience by presenting a puzzle or riddle that needs to be solved.

3. Symbolic - connotation

4. Semic - denotation

5. cultural understanding - events which can be recognised as being part of a culture.

- In my opinion, thrillers tend to take Todorov's and Barthes narrative structure because its has a clear start, middle and end and also suitable to the thriller genre as it is conventional. It is important because it helps to make the audience to understand the narrative clearly without being confused and lost track from the movie.

 

Conclusion

- All the information above has helped me to develop a deeper understanding about narrative structure and theorist that came up with different style of narrative structure in the media industry. I am planning to use Todorov's and Barthes to develop my own narrative and to gain as many marks as necessary.