Narrative structures

What is Narrative Structure?

Narrative structure is really about two things: the content of a story (i.e. what a story is about)

and the form used to tell a story (i.e. how a story is told).

Two common ways to describe these

two parts of narrative structure are: story and plot.

Story refers to the raw materials of dramatic action as they might be described in chronological

order in a film.

Plot refers to the form of storytelling, or the structure, the story follows.

An example may be helpful.

If we want to analyze narrative structure, we can use who, what, and where questions to

look at the story or content of a movie.

How questions are used to examine plot structure.

Deconstruction

Separating Plot And Story

Think of a feature film, and jot down

a) the strict chronological order in which events occur

b) the order in which each of the main characters finds out about these events

a) shows story,

b) shows plot construction.

Plot keeps audiences interested eg) in whether the children will discover Mrs Doubtfire is really their father, or shocks them, eg) the 'twist in the tale" at the end of The Sixth Sense.

Identifying Narrator Who is telling this story is a vital question to be asked when analysing any media text.

Stories may be related in the first or third person, POVs may change, but the narrator will always

* reveal the events which make up the story

* mediate those events for the audience

* evaluate those events for the audience

The narrator also tends to POSITION the audience into a particular relationship with the characters on the screen.

Comprehending Time

Very few screen stories take place in real time.

Whole lives can be dealt with in the 90 minutes of a feature film, an 8 month siege be encompassed within a 60 minute TV documentary.

There are many conventions to denote time passing, from the time/date information typed up on each new scene of The X-Files to the aeroplane passing over a map of a continent in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Other devices to manipulate time include:

* flashbacks

* dream sequences

* repetition

* different characters' POV

* flash forwards

* real time interludes

* pre-figuring of events that have not yet taken place

Locating the Narrative

Each story has a location.

This may be physical and geographical (eg a war zone) or it may be mythic (eg the Wild West).

Virtual locations are now a feature of many newsrooms (eg the computers and holograms of the BBC's Nine O'Clock News).

There are sets of conventions to do with that location, often associated with genre and form (eg all space ships seem to look the same inside).

Narrative Conventions

When unpacking a narrative in order to find its meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine the conventions of

* Genre

* Character

* Form

* Time

and use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text.

In particular, Time is something that we understand as a convention - narratives do not take place in real time but may telescope out (the slow motion shot which replays a winning goal) or in (an 80 year life can be condensed into a two hour biopic).

Therefore we consider "the time of the thing told and the time of the telling." (Christian Metz Notes Towards A Phenomenology of Narrative).

It is only because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age, and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions.

A narrative in its most basic sense is a series of events, but in order to construct meaning from the narrative those events must be linked somehow.

Here’s a review from Phillip French, one of the world’s greatest film critics. He writes in The Observer every Sunday

Groundhog Day

Philip French

Sunday August 13, 2006

The Observer

Directed by Harold Ramis

1993, PG, Sony/Columbia

Now that we've had such inventive metaphysical Hollywood comedies as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this movie seems less extraordinary today than it did a dozen years ago. In 1993, this subtle, thoughtful film came out of the blue from a director, Harold Ramis, and a star, Bill Murray, principally associated with broad, crowd-pleasing farce.

Murray, who combines the poised dead-pan of Jack Benny with the misanthropy of WC Fields, has never been better than as Phil Connors, a cynical TV weather forecaster sent with a producer (Andie MacDowell) and a cameraman to cover a folksy traditional event in a small Pennsylvania town he despises. But a blizzard he's failed to forecast traps him there and he's caught in a time warp, condemned to repeat the same day, 2 February, for ever until somehow he can find a way out of this labyrinth.

If there's no tomorrow, anything is possible and Phil can try anything, including suicide, can be an indulgent child, a Superman, the local Mr Nice Guy or God himself. And he can perfect his character and effect a moral transformation.

The idea is not new.

Several sci-fi writers have used it and Dickens's A Christmas Carol (in a modern version of which, Scrooged, Murray starred five years earlier) and Capra's It's a Wonderful Life lie behind it.

But the script by Ramis and Danny Rubin is endlessly inventive, and Ramis handles the movie with a lighter touch than he has shown before or since. It's one of those films that rewards regular visits and in which you see different things according to your age and your mood.

It's difficult, for instance, to see the repeated encounters between Murray and the insurance agent played by the marvellous Stephen Tobolowsky without thinking of the latter's tragic entrapment in a later film about time and memory, Christopher Nolan's Memento. There's a first-rate monograph on Groundhog Day in the BFI Modern Classics series by Ryan Gilbey.

A time loop is a common plot device in science fiction (especially in universes where time travel is commonplace) in which time runs normally for a set period (usually a day or a few hours) but then skips back like a broken record.

When the time loop "resets", the memories of most characters are reset (i.e. they forget all that happened). This situation resembles the mythological punishment of Sisyphus, condemned to repeatedly push a stone uphill only to have it roll back down once he reached the top, and Prometheus, condemned to have his liver torn out and eaten by an eagle each morning.

The plot is advanced, however, by having one or more central characters retain their memory or become aware of the loop through déjà vu.

The best-known example of this is in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, although time loops had appeared in many fictional works prior to that.

Stories with time loops commonly center on correcting past mistakes or on getting a character to recognize some key truth; escape from the loop may then follow (this can be seen as a metaphor for reincarnation).

Third reality

The story starts a third time. Lola is a split second faster, since she leaps over the steps where she would be tripped, and stops on Mr. Meyer's (her father's co-worker) car long enough to prevent an accident that happens in the other realities.

This allows Mr. Meyer to get to work and pick up Lola's father. As a result, Lola misses her father completely. Not knowing what to do, she decides to simply keep running.

She arrives at a casino, receives a single 100-mark chip, and finds a roulette table. She wins two consecutive bets on the number "20", which gives Lola 127,000 marks. More than sufficient money to help Manni, but she still must catch him in time.

She hitches a ride in the same ambulance from before, unnoticed by the driver, as it stops in front of the crew with the window pane.

The ambulance is carrying Schuster, the security guard from her father's bank, who has apparently suffered a heart attack, as foreshadowed by his clutching his chest and his loud heartbeats on the soundtrack earlier in the film.

Although some English subtitles have Lola saying "I'll stay with him," the actual German line is "Ich gehöre zu ihm," which translates as "I'm with him" (literally: "I belong with him.") She holds Schuster's hand, and moments later, his heart rate begins to return to normal.

Meanwhile, Manni has borrowed a phone card from a blind woman to make a phone call seeking a loan. As in the other sequences, he returns the phone card to the woman he borrowed it from, but this time the woman gestures with her head, and Manni looks up to notice the bum with his money riding by on a bicycle.

Manni is successful in chasing down the bum, recovering his money, and delivering it to Ronnie. He gives the bum his pistol in exchange for the bag of cash, perhaps suggesting that he is going to quit his life of crime.

Lola arrives to find Manni stepping out of Ronnie's car under congenial circumstances. The movie ends with Manni asking Lola what's in the bag she's carrying, which contains her casino winnings.

Throughout the film, Lola bumps into people, talks to them, or passes them by entirely.

Details of that person's future are subsequently shown in a series of still frames.

The futures are widely divergent from encounter to encounter. In one scenario, a woman whom Lola accidentally bumps into wins the lottery and becomes rich; in a different scenario, she remains poor and kidnaps an unattended baby after her child was taken away by social workers.

In yet another scenario, the woman experiences none of the above and becomes a religious preacher.

Several moments in the film allude to a supernatural awareness of the characters. For example, in the first reality, a nervous Lola is shown by Manni how to use a gun by removing the safety, whereas she does this as if remembered from a previous experience in the second reality.

Lola's encounters with Schuster also contain an air of the supernatural, with strong hints that the two share a father-daughter relationship, even if only on a subconscious level.

The movie itself begins by posing questions pertaining to the unpredictability of the world and the unknowable nature of its meaning.

It suggests that drastically disparate consequences can alter the fates of different people from a one second change in the time of one person's running.