From the LMS:

Question One (500 words)

i. Select one of the following films for analysis:

Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) or any film directed by Steven Spielberg

Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) or any film directed by George Lucas

Meet Me In St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944) or any film directed by Vincente Minnelli

A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954) or any film directed by George Cukor

The Searchers (Ford, 1956) or any film directed by John Ford

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) or any film directed by Alfred Hitchcock

All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955) or any film directed by Douglas Sirk

ii. Explain the key factors of the narrative construction (plot, story, cause and effect, time, space) of your selected film.

 

Question Two (500 words)

i. Select one of the following films for analysis.

A Bout de Souffle (Godard, 1959) or any film directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962) or any film directed by Francois Truffaut

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) or any film directed by Vittorio De Sica

Rome Open City (Rossellini, 1945) or any film directed by Roberto Rossellini

Belle de Jour (Bunuel, 1967) or any film directed by Luis Bunuel

Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957) or any film directed by Akira Kurosawa

Battle Ship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) or any film directed by Sergei Eisenstein

ii. Describe the primary ways in which the narrative construction of your selected film departs from Classical Hollywood narrative principles.

This week we’ll take a look at the Classical Hollywood narrative principles, through the following Key Topics: Plot v. Story, Time, Linearity/cause-and-effect, Diegesis, Space.

What is a narrative? Plot v. Story

Defining a narrative is fairly simple, Allan Rowe simply calls the idea of a narrative “the idea that films have a primary function of telling a story” (Rowe 1996, 115). It’s all the technical mumbo-jumbo that gets in the way. We’re going to go with the Bordwell/Thompson way of understanding how a narrative is constructed in two elements: Plot and Story.

Plot is essentially the content of the film: all the events and content that is depicted in a direct audio/visual manner to the viewer. Do you see it/hear it on the screen? Then it’s part of the plot.

Story, meanwhile, is anything that is in the content of the narrative but is not directly presented to the viewer. The lines can blur a bit, but it is generally safe to assume that if you don’t see an event on the screen, but can infer its happening based upon the plot, then it is part of the story. For instance, in the famous Citizen Kane montage (I can’t seem to find it on YouTube), years pass in a few moments of screen time: the plot contains very little through these seconds, but they fill the story with years of inferred relationship-angst. Cine Y Crispetas has another good example: “we meet the Tenembaum(sic) family when the kids are around the age of 9 and the story ends when they are around 35 each, therefore the story happens in a period of over 20 years” while “the time frame of the plot is perhaps a year from the moment that Royal fakes his illness to the moment when he actually —-” (deleted in case anyone hasn’t seen the film).

From cineycrispetas again: ‘In other words, both story and plot share events that are explicitly presented, however, the story “goes beyond the plot suggesting some diegetic events” that as viewers we never witness (although we might infer them), and the plot “goes beyond the story world presenting nondiegetic images and sounds which may affect our understanding of the story”.’ We’ll come back to this in a bit.

Time

As is evident above, time (and its depiction) play a very important role in how we understand narration. In Classical Hollywood cinema, events may or may not be expressed in chronological order (most often they are, however Citizen Kane (as an example) is one of the hallmark films of the time that warps the depiction of events), however often we, the viewer, are expected to piece them together. Flashbacks are an example of temporal rupture which are so frequently used that we seamlessly integrate them into the story-time of the film. Bordwell and Thompson identify three key forms of temporal duration:

1. Duration of the story
2. Duration of the plot
3. Duration of the film

Can you define each of the above in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey? Hint:

Linearity/cause-and-effect

Classical Hollywood Narration relies upon causality: a chain of events which produce a linear narrative where each event happens as a result of and which in turn produces another event. Classical thrillers/detective movies rely very heavily on this tradition, as the initial mystery is only solved by following a line of clues. Stanley Kubrick plays on this in the above clip from 2001: what is implied about the causality of human existence?

For those doing Italian Neo-Realism, how does Ladri di Biciclette alter this causal format?

Diegesis

Diegesis is the filmic world: the world of the narrative. It includes any elements of the film that are considered to be “inside the dream.” It is important to recognize what parts of a film are considered diegetic, or inside the diegesis, and non-diegetic, or outside the diegesis.

Diegetic elements include the characters, the setting, the mise-en-scene (more in space), as well as lighting (in most cases), dialogue (in most cases), music (in some cases). If you can trace an origin to the element that is physically inside the filmic world, then the element itself is diegetic.

Non-diegetic elements include any element whose source cannot be traced to within the filmic world. This often includes voice over, music, possibly lighting sources which we recognize as existing outside of the filmic world (though we aren’t supposed to recognize it as such - i.e. penlights).

Is this music diegetic? Anyone writing on New Wave should really look at the second clip, Godard manipulates the diegesis frequently.

Bande A Parte -

Space

Being a visual medium, space and the viewing of space is a fundamental component of cinema. Early cinema was silent, and although rarely seen in silence (Rowe 1996, 113), the narration was presented solely in visual terms. We’ll look at the construction of space briefly through ideas of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and we’ll do editing next week.

Mise-en-scene refers to those components of the film which can be identified within a single shot. These include the following: setting (outdoor, or indoor, studio or location, realistic or fantastic), props (costumes, objects — Rowe refers to props as signifiers, either of genre (think garlic/cross for a vampire flick) or of meaning (the sled in Citizen Kane is a good example)), actors/performance (it is debatable whether performance can really be seen in a single shot, however gesture and expression is certainly viable).

Cinematography refers to both lighting and the camera. I’m lumping them together because that’s the way they are organized in a film production. Lighting helps shape a scene, and draw our attention to what the director intends. Lighting can be broken down into three types of lighting - key lighting, off-key (fill) lighting, and backlighting.

We’ll do more exercises on this later.

The Camera is what makes film from a still art into a moving one. When breaking a scene down, you will talk about the variety of shots - whether from a distance or up close, whether still or tracking, whether straight on or tilted/canted (they mean the same thing), whether the camera itself is still or moving, where the camera is focused…

For the greatest example of cinematography in recent history, check out Children of Men:

The following websites might help a bit:

davidbordwell.net - David Bordwell is one of the reigning gurus, along with his wife Kristin Thompson, for understanding formulas of narration, his website is pretty cool.

Plus he’s not all that bad looking either, in a mountain man kind of way…

As always, wikipedia has some good entries: Classical Hollywood Cinema, Continuity Editing are two good ones.

Associated Content is a site I’m not too familiar with but which seems to have some decent (if unreliable and very basic) articles on a variety of film matters. Take it with a grain of salt though, and use it only as a base of knowledge. If you ever read something that contradicts the site, lean in favor of the opposition.

Cine Y Crispetas seems like another blog for a university course, and this entry is a fairly good breakdown of the Narrative as a Formal System chapter in the Bordwell and Thompson. It is in English, although it seems to be written by a native Spanish speaker, and so there are probably a few typos, etc.