NarrativeExplain how you used conventional and /or

experimental narrative approaches in one of your pieces.

Music Video

Objectives

• To revise key narrative theorists and terms

• Apply critical frameworks to your own production

• Write a detailed plan outlining narrative approaches, terms, key shots / aspects to discuss

diegesis verisimilitude rules of continuity

temporal coherence

Spatial coherence

audience positioning

fabula syuzhet Enigma codes

Classical Hollywood cinema

decoding protagonist

Audience equilibrium linearity of cause and effect

disequilibrium stability enigma

Relate theorist to terms

• Bordwell and Thompson (1997)

• Pam Cook (1985)

• Tzvetan Todorov (1977)

Barthes (1977)

Music videos and narrative

Matt Hanson –

Music video as an experimental art form

Unconventional storytelling in its form – no dialogue, use of montage, bricolage

The structure of the Classic Narrative System – Pam Cook (1985)

How far does our music video provide a familiar narrative structure compared to mainstream film?

• Linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution

• A high degree of narrative closure

• A fictional world that contains verisimilitude especially governed by spatial and temporal coherence

Application of theory

• What does Cook’s theory on classic narrative system in Hollywood films reveal about your narrative structure in your music video?

Tzvetan Todorov (1977)

How does your music video play with the audience's expectation of?:

• Stable equilibrium (harmony)

• Disruption causes dis-equilibrium (some kind of force)

• Recognition that disruption has taken place.

• Action directed against the disruption

• New equilibrium (final state not the same as initial state)

Bordwell and Thompson (1997)

• The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."

Bordwell and Thompson (1997)

• Distinctions between story and plot

• Diegetic world of the narrative

• Audience positioning

• Fabula – chronological series of events

• Syuzhet – techniques of their presentation in the narrative.

Approaches to narrativeDavid Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational

Principles and Procedures." • 3 ways to analyse narrative:

– SEMANTICS of a narrative: A narrative can be studied as representation, how it refers to or signifies a world or body of ideas – how does your narrative signify a body of ideas?.

– STRUCTURE A narrative can also be studied as a structure, the way its components combine to create a distinctive whole. How does binary oppositions help show that the components create meaning?

– Finally, we can study a narrative as an act, a dynamic process of presenting a story to a perceiver. This would embrace considerations of source, function, and effect; the temporal progress of information or action; and concepts like the "narrator." This is the study of narration,

the "pragmatics" of narrative phenomena. – what is the fabula and syuzhet of your narrative? The temporal progress?

Analysis of narration (Bordwell)Bordwell outlines characteristics of narration. Some are interesting in demonstrating how unconventional music videos can be:•Self-consciousness: the degree to which the narration acknowledges its address to the spectator. •Communicativeness: the extent to which the narration withholds or communicates fabula [story] information.•Compositional motivation: justifying the presence of an element by its function in advancing the syuzhet [plot]. •Realistic motivation: justifying the presence of an element by virtue of its conformity with some extratextual reality. •Artistic motivation: justifying the presence of an element by its calling attention to itself as a distinct device.

Application of theory

• What does Bordwell and Thompson’s theory on classic narrative system in Hollywood films reveal about your narrative structure in your music video?

Binary oppositions

• Jacques Derrida, recognised that ‘binary pairs’ were never equal. He saw that within any particular culture, one ‘side’ of each binary pair tended to be valued or judged in a more privileged light. It was as if one half of each binary pair were somehow ‘culturally marked’ by a kind of ‘presence’ that made it more highly valued whereas its binary opposite was ‘marked’ by a kind of ‘absence’ that rendered it the less highly valued part of the binary pair.

• What are the organising principles of your production?

Barthes (1977) – narrative codes

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds”

• How do these codes help to construct narrative?

• - symbolic- semic- enigma- action- cultural

Structuring your response

In creating our music video we set out to construct a narrative of.….. …. however studying narrative theorists such as ……and ….. Demonstrates that the structure is quite conventional/unconventional in terms of visual media and classical narrative styles. Music videos as a media form are…

(Name of theorist) is…..and (who/what? - one line)

(Outline all stages of theory)…

(Detail how your production fits in with stages)…

(Evaluate use of theory) However…

(Refer back to question.. Conventional in terms of theory? But research into other texts?)