Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
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The Nature of Narrative
in Film
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
■ explain why a script serves as the foundation
■ explain the concept of authorship in cinema
for a film
and why it is a problematic concept
■ explain why the storytelling function came to
■ distinguish between real and implied authors
film early in its history
■ explain how point of view operates in film
■ explain the relationship between narrative and
narratives
the mass production of film
■ describe the classical Hollywood narrative
■ explain the three basic elements of narrative
■ distinguish explicit causality from implicit
■ differentiate between story and plot and
causality and explain their different narrative
explain how filmmakers may creatively
effects
manipulate this distinction
From Chapter 7 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.
Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
■ explain the counter-narrative tradition in
■ define the nature of film genre
cinema
■ describe the types of stories found in the
major film genres
■ describe the viewer’s contribution to narrative
Stories are found in all cultures. Narrative is a universal human activity used for entertainment, instruction, and socialization. It is also an essential way that people think about themselves and their world. To explain how things change or how they got to be, people tell stories.
Given the universality of narrative, it is not surprising that cinema, in its popular forms, has been a narrative medium.
Commercial filmmakers use the camera, light, color, actors, sound, and editing to tell stories. Fiction films are distributed internationally, and fans of Westerns, science fiction films, and other genres turn to them for pleasure and enrichment. Narrative is also central to the tradition of documentary filmmaking. Many documentary filmmakers will say that they cannot define the structure of their film until they find the story that they are going to tell.
The importance of narrative for popular movies cannot be overestimated. What, then, is narrative, and what are its structural elements in film? This chapter explains when and why narrative came to the movies, examines some of the basic elements of narrative structure, and concludes by examining what the viewer contributes to the experience of narrative.
STORY AND SCRIPT
Though cinema is an audiovisual medium, it begins with the written word. The initial step in the production of a film is completion of a script. Much like a play, the script tells the story in a scene-by-scene fashion, with dialogue and character interactions written out in detail. The script furnishes the basic structure of story and dramatic action that filmmakers will transform into picture and sound. There is no substitute for these attributes at the scripting stage; filmmakers find it difficult to develop them once a production has commenced and is before the cameras. Shekhar Kapur, the director of Elizabeth (1998), joined that project when the script was in its third revision, and nothing went before the cameras until the script was in its thirteenth draft. The resulting film is uncommonly rich and well designed, in large part because of its solid, scripted foundation.
The elegance of structure found in such exquisitely told narrative films as
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo originated in outstanding scripts. (For Vertigo , Hitchcock went through three screenwriters before he got what he wanted.) Because of the structural complexity of filmmaking, a great deal about the medium must be preplanned and predetermined. As a result, filmmakers cannot simply
improvise shots and action and expect their finished film to have a sophisticated and intricate visual and narrative design. This design must be planned in advance.
Filmmakers use the camera, sound, and editing to shape stories and bring them to life as cinema. But all this begins with a script, even though the screenwriter, in practice, will specify few details of camerawork. (That is an area left to the director.) The audiovisual design of a film falls outside the domain of the screenwriter.
The script, however, furnishes the narrative, dramatic action, and dialogue that a director then has the job of visualizing, using all the tools that the craft of filmmaking offers.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
TIME CODE (SCREEN GEMS, 2000)
In this unusual film, a split-screen technique divides the frame into four grids, with each conveying a separate storyline, but all centering on the same events and characters. The plots even move from grid to grid, and the narrative becomes a kaleidoscopic mosaic.
Changes in the sound mix “tell” viewers which grid to concentrate on. Director Mike Figgis shot on digital video in extended takes running almost 90 minutes. The only “editing” is that which occurs when the viewer compares the picture information across the four grids. Frame enlargement.
THE TURN TO NARRATIVE IN EARLY FILM HISTORY
The storytelling function in cinema arrived quickly. Public exhibition of projected motion pictures dates from 1895, when the photographic equipment manufacturers Auguste and Louis Lumière held a public screening of their short films. Called “actualities,” they focused on everyday life and did not assume a narrative format. Subjects included parents feeding a baby, workers knocking over a wall, a train pulling into a station, and workers leaving a factory.
One film on the early program, however, The Gardener Gets Watered (1895), anticipated the use of film as a storytelling medium. A gardener watering his lawn is tormented by a mischievous boy who kinks the hose and then straightens it, spray-ing the gardener’s face. He retaliates by chasing and spanking the boy. The film thus shows a series of events that were clearly staged for the camera and which present an episode of narrative action ordered in time, with a beginning and an end.
In the United States, movies were an early attraction on the vaudeville stage, where motion picture presentations coexisted with slapstick comedians, singing 231
The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE GARDENER GETS
WATERED (1895)
The use of film to tell stories fol-
lowed soon after the invention
of cinema. This early Lumière
film, The Gardener Gets Watered ,
staged events for the camera and
sequenced them as narrative.
Frame enlargement.
performances, dramatic recitations, and animal shows. By 1902, however, narrative films, particularly comedies, began to appear and were greeted enthusiastically by the public.
They coexisted, however, with a vast amount of nonfiction film material, including travelogues (films showing beautiful, exotic, or faraway places) and films focused on topical events such as a yacht race or political parade. Narrative film, though, quickly became the predominant form, displacing these nonfiction formats. The public was enthusiastic about story films, including comedies, dramas, chases, or trick films (films favoring such special optical effects as characters appearing and disappearing or moving in fast or slow motion). Nickelodeons—storefront theaters where the public could see an entire program of films for 5 or 10 cents—sprang up in great numbers, by 1910 attracting about 26 million Americans per week (a little less than 20 percent of the national population).
The nickelodeon boom demonstrated the explosion of popular interest in the
movies, and it challenged pro
ducers to optimize film production so that it could meet the growing popular demand for motion picture entertainment. In this regard, story films offered decisive advantages over nonfiction production. Stories could be written as fast as films were needed, and they could capitalize on the scenic features of a given production company’s locale. By contrast the documentary filmmaker was a hostage to events. Production had to wait for the interesting yacht race or parade to occur.
The only limit on the production of story films was the imagination of the writers and the physical resources of the production companies.
Historian Robert Allen has argued that the shift to narrative films can be explained in part by these advantages and points out that by 1909, fiction films represented 97 percent of the industry’s total output. Public interest and the needs of the expanding industry decisively shifted film production into the narrative mold. The narrative sophistication of early film rapidly matured. The work of director D. W.
Griffith, beginning in 1908, displayed a special narrative brilliance and an unprecedented sophistication of visual design. Since the first decade of the medium’s history, then, narrative has been an essential ingredient in the popular appeal of cinema, and it furnished the key basis on which the industry could flourish.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
D. W. Griffith
In early film history, D. W. Griffith perfected (though
and acquiring meaning in relation to the other shots
he did not invent) the essential techniques of mo-
that made up the scene. He drastically varied cam-
tion picture narrative. Griffith’s understanding of
era position and angle, freely incorporating low- and
the principles of film structure and the methods of
high-angle shots, as well as long shots, medium
cinematic storytelling was uncommonly sophisti-
shots, and close-ups. In Enoch Arden , Griffith used
cated. Viewed today, the camerawork and editing in
a psychological image to show what a character is
his films seem thoroughly modern, even though the
thinking. The camera draws close to the character’s
melodramatic stories appear somewhat dated.
face, then Griffith cuts to another scene that repre-
Griffith was born in Kentucky in 1875, into a fam-
sents the character’s mental image.
ily ruined and impoverished by the Civil War and
Griffith skillfully placed his cameras to frame shots
Reconstruction. Determined to become an actor and
in highly expressive ways. In The Birth of a Nation ,
playwright, Griffith loved the theater and considered
when the Little Colonel returns home from the Civil
it to be a legitimate art. By contrast, he thought the
War, he is greeted by his mother. Rather than show-
movies were a bastard offspring, and he came to
ing the mother’s face, Griffith discreetly shows only
them reluctantly after failing to launch a successful
her arms reaching out from inside the house to em-
theatrical career. In 1908, Griffith made his first film
brace him. This discreet framing, with its use of off-
at the Biograph Studio in New York, where he contin-
screen space, intensifies the emotions of the reunion
ued to work until 1913. In his Biograph films, Griffith
by emphasizing their private nature.
developed an increasingly complex and expressive
By 1915 and 1916, when Griffith completed his
visual style that he used to punch his stories across
epics, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance , he had
with maximum emotional impact. He perfected this
perfected the essential building blocks of modern mo-
style by directing a huge number of films. He directed
tion picture narrative: rapid changes of camera posi-
86 films in 1910, for example, and 70 films in 1911.
tion and angle, close-ups used to intensify the drama
Their subjects fell into categories that would define
and reveal emotion, complex editing used to fracture
the basic Hollywood genres: gangster films, Westerns,
a scene into a series of dramatically incomplete shots,
biblical films, and war films.
camera movement used to extend the frame and fol-
At Biograph, Griffith strained against the narrative
low action, and cross-cutting of multiple story lines.
restrictions imposed by the one-reel format (one reel
Unfortunately, Griffith’s brilliant grasp of film
was approximately 10 minutes). In 1911, he made
structure accompanied racist and reactionary
Enoch Arden in two reels, and in 1913 he made the
attitudes. Most notoriously, The Birth of a Nation
biblical epic, Judith of Bethulia , his final Biograph film,
portrayed the Civil War and Reconstruction as catas-
in four reels. By moving to longer forms, Griffith was
trophes that destroyed the happy plantation life of
able to tell increasingly complex stories. After leav-
the South and, by freeing southern slaves, unleashed
ing Biograph, Griffith made two epics, The Birth of a
a tide of black villainy against virtuous white aris-
Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), which master-
tocrats. In the film’s climax, the Ku Klux Klan saves
fully wove together multiple plotlines and featured
southern honor and white virtue by restoring order
huge casts of characters. At silent speeds, each film
throughout the South. Because of its virulent racism,
ran approximately three hours.
The Birth of a Nation remains as inflammatory today
Griffith’s films are a virtual catalogue of modern
as when it was first screened. Its explosive nature is
motion picture technique. By using multiple camera
evidence of Griffith’s filmmaking skill. Its visual power
positions and fluid editing, he fractured a scene
and emotional manipulation of audiences make its
into its constituent shots, intercutting freely to cre-
racism all the more vicious and repugnant.
ate smooth continuity. Each shot was dramatically
Griffith tried to rebut charges that he was a
incomplete, recording just a fragment of the action
racist and calls for censoring the movies with
( continued)
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(1915)
Griffith was a director of remarkable
visual brilliance. In this moment of
quiet intimacy from The Birth of a
Nation , a soldier returning from the
Civil War is greeted by his mother
and sister. Their arms encircle and
draw him into the house. The image
is eloquent in its restraint and sim-
plicity. Frame enlargement.
Intolerance , a complex film weaving together a
Griffith continued to make several more outstand-
modern story of crime and gangsters with stories
ing films ( Broken Blossoms , 1919; True Heart Susie , 1919; about the fall of Babylon, the massacre of the
Way Down East , 1920; Orphans of the Storm , 1922),
Huguenots in medieval France, and the crucifixion
but during the 1920s his melodramatic stories seemed
o
f Christ. Griffith drew an epic portrait of social
increasingly old-fashioned, and except for two produc-
intolerance by telling these stories simultaneously,
tions, the coming of sound put an end to his career.
cutting back and forth among them to create dra-
His last picture was the undistinguished The Struggle
matic and emotional connections. Its elaborate nar-
(1931). On his death in 1948, at age 73, he was a
rative structure made Intolerance a film far ahead of
lonely, forgotten man who spent his last years living on
its time. Even today, it remains a challenging film.
the fringes of a Hollywood that had passed him by. ■
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(1915)
By 1915, cinema had reached
artistic maturity and attained
great narrative sophistication.
The Birth of a Nation presented
an epic (and intensely racist)
narrative of unprecedented
structural complexity. The cir-
cular masking on this shot is an
iris—commonly used in silent
cinema—which director D. W.
Griffith employs to focus the
viewer’s attention on the Little
Colonel (Henry B. Walthall) as
he defiantly rams a flag into
the barrel of an enemy can-
non. Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
Narratives have three fundamental characteristics: (1) an understanding between viewers and the filmmaker about how the story should be judged, (2) a story and plot sequencing events into a particular order that forms the narrative, and (3) a narrator and narrative point of view.
The Fictive Stance
Audiences evaluate fictional stories differently from nonfictional ones, and they generally want to know to what degree a story is fiction or nonfiction. With fiction, the audience willingly suspends its disbelief in order to experience the pleasures of an imaginary world. The audience agrees to accept the contents of the story as real at one level of make-believe while knowing, at another level, that it is only a story.
Critic Peter Lamarque has termed this agreement the “fictive stance.”
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 37