test

1. Narrative
Explain how you used conventional and /or
experimental narrative approaches in one
of your pieces.
Music Video

2. Objectives
• To revise key narrative theorists and terms
• Apply critical frameworks to your own
production
• Write a detailed plan outlining narrative
approaches, terms, key shots / aspects to
discuss

3. diegesis verisimilitude rules of
continuity
temporal
coherence
Spatial
coherence
audience
positioning
fabula syuzhet Enigma codes
Classical
Hollywood
cinema
decoding protagonist
Audience equilibrium linearity of
cause and
effect
disequilibrium stability enigma

4. Relate theorist to terms
• Bordwell and Thompson (1997)
• Pam Cook (1985)
• Tzvetan Todorov (1977)
Barthes (1977)

5. Music videos and narrative
Matt Hanson –
Music video as an
experimental art form
Unconventional
storytelling in its form –
no dialogue, use of
montage, bricolage

6. The structure of the Classic Narrative
System – Pam Cook (1985)
How far does our music video provide a
familiar narrative structure compared to
mainstream film?
• Linearity of cause and effect within an
overall trajectory of enigma resolution
• A high degree of narrative closure
• A fictional world that contains
verisimilitude especially governed by
spatial and temporal coherence

7. Application of theory
• What does Cook’s theory on classic
narrative system in Hollywood films reveal
about your narrative structure in your
music video?

8. Tzvetan Todorov (1977)
How does your music video play with the
audience's expectation of?:
• Stable equilibrium (harmony)
• Disruption causes dis-equilibrium (some kind
of force)
• Recognition that disruption has taken place.
• Action directed against the disruption
• New equilibrium (final state not the same as
initial state)

9. Bordwell and Thompson (1997)
• The fabula is "the raw material of a story,
and syuzhet, the way a story is
organized."

10. Bordwell and Thompson (1997)
• Distinctions between story and plot
• Diegetic world of the narrative
• Audience positioning
• Fabula – chronological series of events
• Syuzhet – techniques of their presentation
in the narrative.

11. Approaches to narrative
David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational
Principles and Procedures."
• 3 ways to analyse narrative:
– SEMANTICS of a narrative: A narrative can be studied as
representation, how it refers to or signifies a world or body of ideas –
how does your narrative signify a body of ideas?.
– STRUCTURE A narrative can also be studied as a structure, the way its
components combine to create a distinctive whole. How does binary
oppositions help show that the components create meaning?
– Finally, we can study a narrative as an act, a dynamic process of
presenting a story to a perceiver. This would embrace considerations of
source, function, and effect; the temporal progress of information or
action; and concepts like the "narrator." This is the study of narration,
the "pragmatics" of narrative phenomena. – what is the fabula and
syuzhet of your narrative? The temporal progress?

12. Analysis of narration (Bordwell)
Bordwell outlines characteristics of
narration. Some are interesting in
demonstrating how unconventional music
videos can be:
•Self-consciousness: the degree to which the narration acknowledges
its address to the spectator.
•Communicativeness: the extent to which the narration withholds or
communicates fabula [story] information.
•Compositional motivation: justifying the presence of an element by
its function in advancing the syuzhet [plot].
•Realistic motivation: justifying the presence of an element by virtue
of its conformity with some extratextual reality.
•Artistic motivation: justifying the presence of an element by its
calling attention to itself as a distinct device.

13. Application of theory
• What does Bordwell and Thompson’s
theory on classic narrative system in
Hollywood films reveal about your
narrative structure in your music video?

14. Binary oppositions
• Jacques Derrida, recognised that ‘binary pairs’
were never equal. He saw that within any
particular culture, one ‘side’ of each binary pair
tended to be valued or judged in a more
privileged light. It was as if one half of each
binary pair were somehow ‘culturally marked’ by
a kind of ‘presence’ that made it more highly
valued whereas its binary opposite was ‘marked’
by a kind of ‘absence’ that rendered it the less
highly valued part of the binary pair.
• What are the organising principles of your
production?

15. Barthes (1977) – narrative codes
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds”
• How do these codes help to construct narrative?
• - symbolic
- semic
- enigma
- action
- cultural

16. Structuring your response
In creating our music video we set out to construct a narrative of.….. ….
however studying narrative theorists such as ……and ….. Demonstrates
that the structure is quite conventional/unconventional in terms of visual
media and classical narrative styles. Music videos as a media form are…
(Name of theorist) is…..and (who/what? - one line)
(Outline all stages of theory)…
(Detail how your production fits in with stages)…
(Evaluate use of theory) However…
(Refer back to question.. Conventional in terms of theory? But research into
other texts?)