Exam Q 1B

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.