Narrative

As with all the key concept questions (1b), the examiner is more interested in your general understanding of the concept rather than your knowledge of particular theorists. So here are the general ways of looking at and applying ideas associated with narrative.

Narrative is way in which a story is told, rather than the sum of events which make the story. Let’s look at Sam and Somah’s trailer, and first let’s look at the story events related by it:

1.       Newspaper clippings with details of gruesome murders.

2.       Heavy breathing of a person running whilst holding the camera

3.       Some young people driving around, lost.

4.       One of them disappears... “seriously, we have to go get him!”

5.       A creepy girl like the one from The Ring crawls towards a dropped camcorder

6.       Another newspaper clipping suggests the lost boy has been murdered

So if that’s the story, what is the narrative?

1.   The camcorder footage signifies a first person narrative, along the lines of Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. This places the audience into the vulnerable position of the characters. This creates an intimate mode of address.

2.       The newspaper clippings have the connotation of true-life events, a narrative device which adds a sense of realism to the story... of course something quite complex is going on here because, much like Paranormal Activity, the audience knows that this isn’t ‘real’ footage, but they recognise the code for it (cheap camcorder footage, camera lying on the ground etc).

3.       The ‘de-tuned TV’ (fuzzy screen) transitions are another narrative device which suggest ellipsis... in other words it is a code for “the camera was turned off, then turned back on again and we don’t know how much time has passed” – this narrative device plays with diegetic time.

4.       The event of one the characters’ disappearance is related through dialogue, rather than through action when the line: “seriously, we have to get him!” is delivered whilst the camera is seemingly pointing at nothing. Again, this pulls the audience into the realism of the narrative through letting them imagine the person filming has possibly just forgotten to switch the camera off.

5.       The creepy girl crawling toward the camera is an intertextual reference to other horrors such as The Ring and The Grudge. This assumes the audience is familiar with these successful films and aims to borrow from their visual impact. It is no mistake this narrative event has been selected for the trailer.

6.       The repetition of the newspaper clippings reinforces the realism, but has a much more important narrative function. It brings the mini-arc of the trailer back full circle to the beginning, which also started on a newspaper clipping. This makes the trailer’s own mini-narrative more memorable, which is one of the main functions of trailers.

Applying theories:

Claude Levi Strauss – Binary Oppositions.

Strauss said that the underlying assumptions and ideologies of a narrative can be understood through analysing the conflict between two opposing elements within it. In this trailer the first conflict we might recognise is between natural and supernatural. Yes, that’s what provides the audience with the thrill of feeling scared... if certain events are not governed by the laws of nature, they are truly beyond the control of the characters.

But one of the narrative conventions of this genre is that teenagers who display low levels of morality – drinking, taking drugs, having sex, lying – are always the first to become victims. In this sense the binary opposite forces in conflict are morality and immorality. This reveals in the producer a very traditional and conservative ideology... drink is bad, drugs are bad, sex is bad... The only way to survive the monster is to abstain from all these vices.

Have a look now at each other’s blogs, see if you can find a blog which details one of the theories you did not look at, then apply what you have learnt to your own work.  

Barthes' Narrative Codes:

The Hermeneutic Code - being a trailer rather than a full feature, your A2 work is essentially a montage of narrative moments which are not fully explained. From this trailer we understand some teenagers are lost, they are recording their actions and they are in some kind of peril. But it raises several questions: 

• Why are they where they are?
• Who or what is the threat?
• Why are they recording this?
• Who will survive? 

Each of these questions is designed to leave the audience in suspense and draw them to the cinema.

Other codes include the Proairetic Code, the Semantic Code, The Symbolic Code, and the Cultural Code.

Do some research into these codes and apply them to one of your coursework projects in a new blog post.