The Four Narrative Theorists

In today's lesson we observed film openings and extracted the narratives about each one. There are four different Narrative Theorists that we studies.

'Barthes' 

Barthes narrative represents the codes that are in films, including action, symbolic features and enigma.Enigma portrays the rhetorical questions we constantly find our self thinking when watching films, for example in the film 'Prestige' the scene makes us wonder; Why do we have to watch closely? What is the relationship between the young girl and the man? Where did the bird cage go? What happened to the man who fell through the floor? Why was he in a tub of water? What happened to him afterward? Is he dead? Was the water there to purposely kill him? The directors of the film purposely make the film indulging by placing all these question in our mind to make us want to continue watching the film, this is what is meant by the term enigma.

'Levi-Strauss'

We also analysed features that appeared in these short films from the narrative theorist

 'Levi-Strauss' which is the binary opposites. Some of the opposites that are frequently used are good and bad characters as well as heroes and villains, some characters, the good and bad characters in films are historical symbolized with light and dark clothing - a bad person dressed in black, and a good person commonly dressed in white. Other examples of binary opposites are, male and females, the rich and the poor and urban and rural settings. In the film 'Prestige' binary opposites are used in the the concept of the audience. For the elder man at the beginning of the scene, the young girl is his only audience. How the other magician has hundreds of people watching his show. 

'Todorov'

Todorov was the third narrative that we analysed. Todorov reflects the structure of a film, the obstacles that need to be overcome. This is because without any problems or dramatic scenes in the film it would be very dull. We came to terms with this by watching a short scene from 'Jack Jack' which showed many problems a babysitter faced when looking after a baby, in which she needed to overcome. All films need a structure like this to keep viewers engaged. Equilibrium is the state or normality. During films, they disturb the equilibrium and then restore is to dramatise the film and keep viewers engaged in the film, as the distruption of equilibrium makes the viewers wonder if it is overcome. This technique is used in many pixar short films.

'Propp'

The 'Propp' narrative is another way on insinuating the characters in the film, e.g. the Hero, the Villain, Doctor, Father, Mother, Friend, Princess, Doner, the Dispatcher and so on.

After annotating a few short films and identifying different factors of each narrative in then, we went on to study a short film of our own in depth in hope that we would recognise fragments of each of the narratives. The clip i chose to analyse was ...