Narrative

NARRATIVE
A Media Studies Key Aspect

What Is It?
Narrative is the media term for story telling.
Narrative is the way the different elements in a story are organised to make a meaningful story. Some of these elements can be facts as in a documentary, or characters and action as in a drama.

What Is It?
When we look at narrative we see that stories throughout the media share certain characteristics. This often links them to genre.
Different media tell stories in a variety of different ways.

Narrative Structure(s)
This is the way the story or plot unfolds.
Is the story an open or closedstructure?
A closed structure means the story ends satisfactorily as in most films – this is known as closure.
An open ending means there is no final conclusion to the story – a television soap has no final ending, it just has minor endings.
Some texts have an interactivestructure e.g. Big Brother.

Narrative Structure(s)
A multi-strand structure means there are several narratives running at the same time. This is very common in television, such as Holby City, and The Bill.
Other narrative structures include point of view (POV). (Documentaries often do this)
A popular narrative device is the enigma. The plot constructs a puzzle that the audience is asked to solve while the characters act out the story.

How it is informed
Narrative is informed by character, action, and location.

How it is informed
Characters have functions such as heroes or villains, or someone who assists the hero or villain as a helper or messenger.

How it is informed
The action determines how the events in the narrative occur and the influence they have.

How it is informed
The location of a film or television programme is an important ingredient in how the story unfolds. A horror film about Dracula must have a castle.

How it is informed
Narrative is often delivered to the audience by expectation, suspense, tension and closure.
The audience is led to expect certain things to happen which leads to tension and excitement.
Expectation, suspense and tension are created by the use of Media Language,

Our Job
Directors and producers use many techniques to get a story to an audience in an involving, interesting, exciting and entertaining way. Our job as media students is to find out what these techniques are, and see where and how they are used and what they mean in media texts. This is known as Textual Analysis.

Questions to ask
How is the narrative organised?
What is the audience’s role in relation to the narrative?
How are the characters used in the narrative?

Questions to ask
What techniques of identification and alienation are used in the text?
What else does the filmmaker do to engage our attention and tell the story?
What are the major themes of the narrative and what values and ideology are evident?

Run Lola Run
1998 German thriller.
Dir. Tom Tykwer
FrankaPotente (Lola)
Moritz Bleibtreu (Manni)
Dist. Sony Pictures
Budget: $1,750,000
Gross: $7,267,585

Narrative Theory
There are four main theorists to consider:
TzvetanTodorov
Vladimir Propp
Roland Barthes
Lévi-Strauss

TODOROV
Todorov’s theory has three main parts:
The text begins with a sate of equilibrium – everything appears to be normal or calm.
There is some kind of disruption or disequalibrium – this is often a threat to the normal situation or it could be just a setback.
A new equilibrium is produced to end the narrative. In the best narratives there is some kind of change for the better perhaps in the main character’s behaviour or outlook on life.

TODOROV
Todorov suggests there are five stages to how the narrative progresses:
The equilibrium has to be carefully shown (otherwise the disruption may not be dramatic enough to create a strong plot)
There is a disruption
There is a recognition that a disruption has happened.
There is an attempt to repair the damage done by the disruption.
A new equilibrium is achieved.

TODOROV
Here narrative is not seen as linear, but as circular.
The narrative is driven by the characters’ attempts to restore the equilibrium, although the end result is not quite the same as the beginning.

PROPP
Propp studied folk tales and he proposed ways of grouping characters and their actions into eight broad character types or ‘spheres of action’.
N.B. One character may occupy more than one sphere of action

Spheres of Action
1. The villain
2. The hero, or character who seeks something, usually motivated by a lack of something (money, love etc.) The hero doesn’t have to be heroic in the way most people would understand it – heroes can be male or female, brave or cowardly.
3. The donor, who provides an object with some magic property.
4. The helper, who aids the hero.

Spheres of Action
5. The princess, reward for the hero, and object of the villain’s schemes. Again, this is not necessarily a beautiful damsel in distress – the princess can be male!
6. Her father, who rewards the hero.
7. The dispatcher, who sends the hero on his way
8. The false hero, the character who also lays claim to the princess but is unsuitable and causes complications.

Star Wars
Match them up

Star Wars - An Example
Villain – Darth Vader
Hero – Luke Skywalker
Donor – Obi-Wan Kenobi
Helper – Han Solo
Princess – Princess Leia
Father – The Rebellion
Dispatcher – R2D2
False Hero – Darth Vader

Levi-Strauss
No, nothing to do with jeans!
He introduced the notion of binary oppositions as a useful way to consider the production of meaning within narratives.
He argued that all construction of meaning was dependent, to some degree, on these oppositions.

Examples
Good vs Evil
Male vs Female
Humanity vs Technology
Nature vs Industrialism
East vs West
Dark vs Light
Dirt vs Cleanliness

Roland Barthes
A name you’ll become very familiar with soon. In the meantime, in terms of narrative he suggested five codes:
The hermeneutic code (the enigma)
The proairetic code (the action)
The semic code (the images)
The symbolic code (the subtext)
The referential code (the cultural influence)

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Narrative

by Andy Wallis on Nov 22, 2010

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Narrative — Presentation Transcript