Apply narrative theories to
one of your coursework productions.
For my AS Coursework I
constructed the opening of a film in a genre of psychological thrillers by
research existing film in the media such as Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs,
The Step-Father & Memento.
The storyline for our film
was about an obsessive stalker who is in love with a girl and attempts to win her affection, through increasingly violent means.
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 to unravel the text for the viewer. One of these is his Enigma code – the purpose of this is to add a sense of mystery, that is done by dropping clues that aren’t not answered, which makes the audience want to watch until the reveal at the end. In order to hook our audience we produced a shot of the Stalker cutting out a picture of a man and stabbing it with a knife. The fact that we never get to see the Stalker’s true emotions while performing this act makes the audience wonder what has happened for him to want violently attack the man in the picture. Therefore, they want to continue watching till they find out.
Barthes also discussed a film
in terms of Action codes. In our film we
included shots of fire, a knife, tarot cards. These conventional iconography of action as they tell an audience that some form of physical conflict will occur.
Semantically,
we also included key codes to help our viewers understand our narrative. For example, our opening sequence establishes
the ideology that our stalker is not sane. This is shown through him dealing
the cards ‘the fool’, ‘the lovers’ & ‘the hermit’ during the sequence.
These cards foreshadow that the plot will include something around those
themes, letting the audience know from the off what the story is related to.
We also included what Barthes
describes as Referential codes (symbols which have meanings in our culture and
society which have further connotations for the viewer) by including shots of
picture taped to the wall with masking tape. In our western culture, this is
understood to mean that the film explores criminality and illegal behaviours.
This is also known to be common themes in horror and thriller films.
Vladimir Propp is a theorist
who discusses narrative purely in terms of character and actions. Despite his research being about fairy tales,
his work is helpful in decoding our sequence.
The antagonist in our film clearly meets Propp’s definition of a villain
in that he is stalking a girl and is plotting to take her for his own, by violent means. We see this with a slow track in towards pictures of a girl in public places. Furthermore, Propp came to the conclusion that all narratives can be
boiled down to a number of functions initiated by these characters. Our film follows the function of….. in that
our protagonist does…..
Todorov’s theories of
narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline. His theory split stories into 5 clear steps:
equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the
repair of it and then the new equilibrium.
Our title sequence plays with these codes in the following way:
Finally Claude Levi-Strauss
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 versus panic). We
included a number of binary oppositions in our opening sequence, such as a
sharp change of pace he exhibits while stroking a picture of the girl and the
sketching of the girls face to symbolise the characters manic & unstable
sanity and personality.
