bordwell ch3

8/12/2019 bordwell ch3

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Narratology – an ugly term, but we can’t do without it.

Our daily lives and the conversations we have are footed in storytelling: you can’t

explain your symptoms to your doctor without explaining the small story of how

you discovered them and what you know about them.

Anything can be turned into a story – and every story can have unexpected endings.

There is the string experiment (“Torres Straits”) in which you pull on the arranged

strings from each/either side and you don’t know what will happen to the knots

(which can represent things like warriors clashing).

Stories and our definitions of what they are have changed through history with

different emerging human activities, cultures, languages, and technology (books, to

pictures, to radio, to moving pictures, to different dimensions, to different color

uses, etc.). And in all of that there is different POVs, themes, styles, uses of our

studies in psychology, commentaries on what is going on in the world at the time,

etc.

What is a Narrative? P-88

Action centered: certain affairs in certain times arranged in certain

orders. But for full stories, we need a more detailed definition. So: all the

events need some common connection with one another.

Narratologists have long distinguished between the organization of the action in

the narrative text and the action as it’s presumed (inferred, extrapolated) to occur

in the story.

Aristotle referred to praxis, all the events constituting the action, and

muthos, those events as structured into a plot.7 Theorists influenced by Frenchstructuralism of the 1960s distinguish between histoire (story) and discours

(discourse). I’ve found it most useful to follow the Russian formalists in using the

concepts of fabula, the story’s state of affairs and events, and syuzhet , the

arrangement of them in the narrative as we have it. In addition, recall my claim

that the fine grain of the medium shapes our construal of events, as in the

Mommy – Santa sentences or the phone call menu. So I would add that narration

must include the patterning of the film’s surface texture, its audiovisual style. 98?

Plot structure is arranged in a way to manage the minds of the

recipients of the story in a certain way.

Agent centered: “This action centered notion of minimal narrative can

be traced back to Aristotle’s poetics” page 89. Agents are the basis of this/the

narrative. character based. Shakespeare’s characters had qualities that

made them make the decisions and actions they made. “Man acts because he

is so”. Identity is the sum of larger forces. Also page 89.



Protagonists and their problems: (90)

Story world vs plot structure

Story world is agents, circumstances, surroundings,

Plot structure is the arrangement of all the parts of the narrative. Actions, reactions.

But there is also Narration – which is the step by step movement by movement flowof the world. How the story is told and what actions of the story is told (povs, style,

step by step things told to us, etc.).

He also has an idea of inferential narration (93) – this is an idea that narration is not

just the things that are shown in the way they are shown set up to be decoded and

understood in a specific way by the recipient of the story. Inferential narration is a

theory that narration is also open to be understood in a way that the recipients

(who are each unique) understand it based on their own ideas and knowledge and

personality. However, not everything in a story is open to interpretation. If a man is

holding a bottle, can’t walk straight, goes in his car, and crashed – it’s most likely a DUI. We know this because of our knowledge of the world, and if someone didn’t get

this it is because they are missing a piece of knowledge. If they interpret it

differently, they’re basically mostly wrong.

Plot structure (102).

Syuzhet – plot

Fabula – story world

“It can mean many things. I’m using it to mean the way in which the syuzhet ispatterned in itself.

Normally, the following is considered plot structure: (4 parts): exposition – which is

best thought of as the function driven process of narration, rising action, climax, and

denouement.

―If the narration is like our trip through a building, the plot structure is like the

building as we might reconstruct it in a blueprint — an abstract, quasi-geometrical

layout of parts according to principles of size, proportion, and contiguity…

… syuzhet structure in effect organizes the actions and states of affairs in the story

world according to a certain pattern of development.‖ 102

external structures – as the physical tools with which we can tell stories have

changed, our stories and the way they are told changed with them. Example is film

reels. They became longer, and became able to be edited, and put together in ways

that we use today. When the reels needed to be changed within the actual theater

projection room(s), filmmakers made their films around this break and made sure

that when it stopped it would be at as much a helpful way to the story as possible.



As time moved on, different studios would have different requirements of the

directors and writers for each parts of the reel (comedy, action, etc.). (103-104).

Page 105 – the 3 act structure VS 5 acts - through theater and film. ―Althoughthere’s some evidence that the three-act structure held sway during the classic

studio years, it was widely disseminated in screenwriting manuals after the 1970s,

chiefly thanks to Syd Field’s influential book Screenplay…

… Field claims that Hollywood films adhere to a three-act structure, having the

rough proportions of 1:2:1. In the first act (25 – 30 minutes into a 2-hour film), a

problem or conflict is established. The second act, running about an hour,

develops that conflict to a peak of intensity. The final half hour or so constitutes a

climax and denouement. Field translated this structure into a screenplay’s page

counts, with each page counting as roughly a minute of screen time.‖.

the next few pages uses ―you’ve go mail‖ and explains how it goes with this

formula.

Page 109 – ―Do viewers recognize these distinct parts? No, because people are

usually surprised when told of them.‖. Just like people can enjoy music without

knowing the theory, they can enjoy and understand the movie without knowing its

structure. However, in my opinion, I enjoy music a lot more after learning piano

and guitar theory. Maybe it will be the same with movies.

… ―Just as interesting, screenwriting manuals recommend that scripts have the

three- act structure, whereas they derive their timing recommendations from

finished films.‖

The narrative world (p110).

―Narration isn’t simply a window through which we watch a preexisting story that

we might see from else- where. By telling the lawyer joke at the start, I coaxed

you into creating the story world by virtue of our shared stock of stereotyped

knowledge. Narration, the inter- action of the syuzhet arrangement and the stylistic

patterning of the film, is the very force that conjures the fabula into being.‖



―… fiction film is narrated through and through. Not just camera position but also

the arrangement of figures in space, not just cutting but also the movements

executed by the actors, and not just zoom shots but also lines of dialogue —

everything, including the solid environment and behaviors we detect, is produced by the film’s narration. That’s all we have to go on; we have no independent

access to the world portrayed on the screen. As I indicated earlier in my

hypothetical example of a phone conversation, to present an event is inevitably to

choose among ways of presenting it, and those ways constitute narration.‖

P112

―My analogy is to visual perception, but I hasten to add that the mechanisms that

lock onto the film are no less attuned to social representations. We makeinferences about which characters are friends, relatives, and strangers; and who

enjoys higher status, greater strength or beauty, or more brains. We watch for

signs of emotion and thought. We bring, that is, all our perceptual and cognitive

skills from the real world to the task of figuring out the social dimension of this

story, and we import anything that we deem relevant to it.‖

Only up to 120.

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bordwell ch3