G325 1b narrative from Graveney School
Narrative Essay 3
For my AS coursework I constructed the opening of a film in a genre of Thriller. For research purposes we looked at a few films, such as Enemy Of The State, and Pulp Fiction.
The storyline for our film is about a man named Michael, who is attempting to kill himself. He has taken some pills and then has put a gun to his head. Just before he pulls the trigger he hears a gun shot from elsewhere in his apartment block. This stops him from killing himself and he goes to see where the gunshot came from. He walks into a room which has an open door and finds a man dying who has just been shot. Michael passes out because of the pills he has taken with his gun still in hand, which leaves him the prime suspect in the resultant murder investigation.
My group decided that our pre-title sequence should hook the audience into the narrative of the film in a number of ways. Roland Barthes discusses narrative in terms of a number of codes that are used to help unravel the text for the viewer. One of these his his Enigma code - the purpose of this is to hook the audience by not giving them all of the details, and withholding information that would make the plot more interesting and more of a mystery. In order to hook our audience we used the Enigma code, and withheld information such as why Michael wanted to kill himself, who killed the dying man, and how Michael would prove himself innocent.
Barthes also discussed a film in terms of Action codes. In our film we included a gun shot sound effect which tells the audience that there will be violence and the repercussions of it in our storyline.
Semantically, we also included key codes to help our viewers understand our narrative. For example slow cuts to build tension, props such as alcohol and pills (all of which are codes and conventions indicating a movie in the thriller genre with typical storylines such as an investigation into a death)
Valdimir Propp is a theorist who discusses narrative purely in terms of characters and actions. Despite his research being about fairy tales, his work is helpful in decoding our sequence. Michael in our film clearly meets Propp's definition of a victim-hero in that he is dragged into the plot by the Dispatcher being the dead man as he must now find the murderer. Furthermore, Propp came to the conclusion that all narratives can be boiled down to a number off functions initiated by these characters. Our film follows the function of 'Departure' in that our protagonist has to go off and find the murderer by himself, as the police will not believe him that he did not kill the man.
Todorovs theories of narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline. His theory splits stories in 5 clear steps: equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the repair of of it and then the new equilibrium. Our title sequence starts with the disruption of equilibrium, as Michael is about to kill himself. This will then go back in time during the film to show a point of equilibrium and then what happened to cause the disruption. The equilibrium will be repaired when Michael is able to prove himself innocent.
Finally Claude Levi-Strausss defines narrative as requiring the constant creation of conflict and opposition. He summarised this in terms of visual opposition (Such as light versus darkness) or conceptual (eg. Love versus hate control verses panic). We included a number of binary oppositions in our option sequence. Our protagonist and our antagonist can be seen as a binary opposite, as one is a villain and the other is a hero. Life and death is another binary opposite that is present in our opening, as we see Michael, who is now alive only thanks to a person being killed.
Narrative Essay 3
For my AS coursework I constructed the opening of a film in a genre of Thriller. For research purposes we looked at a few films, such as Enemy Of The State, and Pulp Fiction.
The storyline for our film is about a man named Michael, who is attempting to kill himself. He has taken some pills and then has put a gun to his head. Just before he pulls the trigger he hears a gun shot from elsewhere in his apartment block. This stops him from killing himself and he goes to see where the gunshot came from. He walks into a room which has an open door and finds a man dying who has just been shot. Michael passes out because of the pills he has taken with his gun still in hand, which leaves him the prime suspect in the resultant murder investigation.
My group decided that our pre-title sequence should hook the audience into the narrative of the film in a number of ways. Roland Barthes discusses narrative in terms of a number of codes that are used to help unravel the text for the viewer. One of these his his Enigma code - the purpose of this is to hook the audience by not giving them all of the details, and withholding information that would make the plot more interesting and more of a mystery. In order to hook our audience we used the Enigma code, and withheld information such as why Michael wanted to kill himself, who killed the dying man, and how Michael would prove himself innocent.
Barthes also discussed a film in terms of Action codes. In our film we included a gun shot sound effect which tells the audience that there will be violence and the repercussions of it in our storyline.
Semantically, we also included key codes to help our viewers understand our narrative. For example slow cuts to build tension, props such as alcohol and pills (all of which are codes and conventions indicating a movie in the thriller genre with typical storylines such as an investigation into a death)
Valdimir Propp is a theorist who discusses narrative purely in terms of characters and actions. Despite his research being about fairy tales, his work is helpful in decoding our sequence. Michael in our film clearly meets Propp's definition of a victim-hero in that he is dragged into the plot by the Dispatcher being the dead man as he must now find the murderer. Furthermore, Propp came to the conclusion that all narratives can be boiled down to a number off functions initiated by these characters. Our film follows the function of 'Departure' in that our protagonist has to go off and find the murderer by himself, as the police will not believe him that he did not kill the man.
Todorovs theories of narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline. His theory splits stories in 5 clear steps: equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the repair of of it and then the new equilibrium. Our title sequence starts with the disruption of equilibrium, as Michael is about to kill himself. This will then go back in time during the film to show a point of equilibrium and then what happened to cause the disruption. The equilibrium will be repaired when Michael is able to prove himself innocent.
Finally Claude Levi-Strausss defines narrative as requiring the constant creation of conflict and opposition. He summarised this in terms of visual opposition (Such as light versus darkness) or conceptual (eg. Love versus hate control verses panic). We included a number of binary oppositions in our option sequence. Our protagonist and our antagonist can be seen as a binary opposite, as one is a villain and the other is a hero. Life and death is another binary opposite that is present in our opening, as we see Michael, who is now alive only thanks to a person being killed.
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