Lourenz Marie Balayan ~ Pg. 350-351

Overview

• Since the past, people have been interested by the alluring powers of storytelling
• Aristotle distinguished two types of fictional narratives in The Poetics:
  • mimesis (showing) -- the place of the live theater where the events "tell themselves"
  • diegesis (telling) -- the place of the literary epic and the novel that is a story told by a narrator who is sometimes reliable and sometimes not.
• Cinema incorporates both forms of storytelling, which is a more complex medium, with a wider range of narrative techniques at its disposal.

Films

• Sunshine (Hungary/ Britain/ Germany Canada, 2000), with James Frain, Jennifer Ehle, and Ralph Fiennes, directed by Istavan Szabo

Epic stories are usually concerned with important themes, in heroic proportions. The protagonist represents the culture, religious, or ethnic ideals. The first irony in the film is that the title came from the family's name, Sonneschein. The family is Jewish, trying to surpass an anti-semitic Hungary and the brutal Communist era. The most successful epics capture the values and aspirations of culture sometimes in an ironic mode.

• Speed (USA 1994), with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, directed by Jan De Bont

"Keanu Reeves stars as Jack Traven, an L.A.P.D. SWAT team specialist who is sent to diffuse a bomb that a revenge-driven extortionist (Dennis Hopper) has planted on a bus. But until he does, Jack and passenger Sandra Bullock must keep the bus speeding through the streets of Los Angeles at more than 50 miles per hour - or the bomb will explode. A high-octane chase of suspense, non-stop action and surprise twists, Speed is a joyride sure to keep everyone on the edge of their seats."

• The Home and the World (India 1984), with Vicotry Bannerjee and Soumitra Chatterjee, directed by Stayajit Ray

An adaptation of a novel. The movie is a subtle psychological study of a triangle involving a rich, liberal, and high caste Hindu who urges his wife to emerge from the traditional seclusion to meet his best friend and ironically falls in love with the friend. The story's pace is slow in order to show the heroine's insecurity. The action is mostly interior - psychological and spiritual rather than physical. Such stories require patience than with urgency.

Links

One can learn more in depth about the differences between diegesis and mimesis on this site ~ Diegesis



Nathaniel pg. 352-353

-Narrative Form has been studied with most of the focus on literature, film, and drama.
-Narratology- study of how stories work, how we make sense of the raw materials of a narrative, and how we fit them together to form a coherent whole (i.e. process of understanding and making film)

-Narratology also includes the study of different narrative structures, storytelling strategies, aesthetic conventions, types of stories (genres such as horror, comedy, action, etc.), and their symbolic implications.

-Narratologists are interested in the forms that people ("message senders") use to communicate with other people/target audiance ("message receivers"). This is known as the rhetoric of storytelling

-The issue at hand is that it is very difficult to determine who the sender is, because scripts/stories are usually a colaborative effort taht the producers, directors, writers, and stars work together on.

Films Referenced: The Good Gril (USA, 20020, written my Mike White and directed by Miguel Arteta -Character-driven stories tend to downplay action in favor of exploring people's psychological complexities. -It usually appeals only to actors (good role to get into), writers (for the challenge), and artistic directors (for the challenge against the "norm")

Masculine-Feminine (France, 1966), directed by Jean-Luc Godard -"I consider myslef -"I consider myslef an essayist...producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them..." (Godard). -Godard has his actors improvise their dialogue so they didn't have the security that the script provided, it gave them a more "fend for themselves" feeling. This is a technique which he derrived from cinema verite.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Carlos pg. 354-355

Voice-over narration: usually this off-screen narrator is also a character in the story and tries to "help us understand the events.
sometimes the narrator is the main character of a movie. ( also referred in "spoken language" in ch.5 and "point of view" in ch. 9)









The Shawshank Redemption (U.S.A., 1994)


in Realistic films, events speak for themselves (for example: plays)
.
in Classical films, someone "re-shapes" and edits the storyline and boring gaps are taken out.

in Formalistic narratives, the author is manipulative, sometimes scrambling the chronology of the story.

JFK (U.S.A., 1991)

Narratology is incomprehensible, because of its abstract language and jargon.

Difference between story and plot:
Story can be defined as the general subject matter, the raw materials of a dramatic action in chronoogical sequence.
Plot involves the storyteller's method of superimposing a structural pattern over the story.

"[plot is] the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intention of meaning" - Peter Brooks