Film Form and Film Style Openings and Endings A narrative starts from its very beginning ab obo or ab initio Casablanca begins with an introduction in which the films backgrounds are explained away ID: 349156
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Slide1
Introduction to Film Studies
Film Form and Film StyleSlide2
Openings and Endings
A narrative starts from its very beginning –
ab
obo or
ab
initio
Casablanca
begins with an introduction in which the film’s backgrounds are explained away.
Alfred Hitchcock’s
Stranger on a Train
(1951) Tennis star Guy Haines meets Bruno Anthony, a stranger on a train. Knowing from a gossip magazine that Guy wants to divorce from his wife, Bruno proposes the perfect ‘
criss-cross
’ murders.
Strangers on a Train
Part IISlide3
Openings
and Endings
Medias-res -
an artistic and literary technique of relating a story from a midpoint rather than the beginning.
Edward
Dmytryk’s
Crossfire
(1947) is about the murder of a man in his girlfriend apartment in Washington DC. A homicide captain discovers evidence that one or more demobilized soldiers are involved in his death. The film begins with the murdering and then shows the events leading up to the killing. Medias-res
CrossfireSlide4
Openings and Endings
Another typical example of
medias-res
found in Francis Ford Coppola’s
Godfather
(1972)
It is about the conflicts and continuing fighting between New York Mafia families, and the death of a godfather and the rise of a younger one. The story begins as Don Vito Corleone, the head of a New York Mafia family, oversees his daughter’s wedding. He is consulting
an
Italian-American who wants help from the godfather.Slide5
Openings and Endings
Closed ending - narrative ends with an unequivocal conclusion
Casablanca
Open ending - narrative ends without clear conclusion and solution so that the reader
or the
viewer
wonder
what will happen after the end of the stories.
François Truffaut’s
400 Blows
(
Quatre
cent coups, 1959)
A teenage boy misunderstood at home and school, commits a minor crime and is sent to an observation
centre
for the juvenile delinquent. He escapes from it while playing football.Slide6
Narrative Analysis
Five foci in the narrative analysis of Gérard
Genette’s
Narratology
. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method
(1980)
Order, frequency, duration, voice and mood
Order: an order of event units being told
Chronological order: telling events following one after another in time; from the oldest to the most recent event
(a) crime
conceived (b) crime planned (c)crime committed (d) crime discovered (e) detective investigates (f) detective
revealsSlide7
Narrative Analysis: Chronological Story-telling Slide8
Narrative Analysis: Non-chronological Story-telling
Narration out of chronological order
Order of telling events is manipulated according to the logic other than chronological
Telling
older events
later
is called ‘
flashback
’Slide9
Narrative Analysis: Chronological Story-telling Slide10
Order
Distant Lives
Most of the stories in
Citizen Kane
are flashbacks.
In Terence Davies’s
Distant Voices, Still Lives,
we see scenes set in the present during a young woman’s wedding day. These alternate with flashbacks to a time when her family lived under the sway of an abusive, mentally disturbed father. Slide11
Order
Flashforward
– a scene that takes the narrative forward in time from the current time of the plot
Nichola
Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now
A man sees his wife in black on a boat, though she is supposed to be away. At the end of the film, it is revealed that she is with her husband’s coffin. Slide12
Frequency
An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular) Today I went to the bar.
An event can occur
n
times and be narrated once (iterative) I used to go to the bar.
An event can occur once and be narrated
n
times (repetitive) I went to the bar.
Different people
saw
me going to the bar.
An event can occur
n
times and be narrated
n
times (multiple) I used to go to the bar and other people saw me going to the bar a number of times. Slide13
Frequency
Peter
Howitt’s
Sliding Doors
(1998) – a young woman gets fired from her public relations job. After she
heads for a London Underground station,
the plot splits into two: one in which she catches the train, the other
in which misses
it. Slide14
Duration
Difference between discourse time and narrative time
Discourse time –
time spent to narrate
the
event
Narrative time – real time that has passed for an
event to take place
‘5 years later’ a lengthy narrative time, but it could be a matter of second in discourse timeSlide15
Duration
Narrative time is normally shorter than discourse time
Several million years are covered in
Space Odyssey
by 161 minutes
Kane’s life covered in
Citizen Kane
in 119
mins
.
Many years covered in Amadeus by 138 minutes
Four days covered in
North by Northwest
by 136 minutes
One day covered in
Hiroshima,
mon
amour
by 90 minutesSlide16
Duration
Elipsis
: the omission of a large section of a narrative
Ozu
Yasujiro’s
Tokyo Story
- the scene of mother lying in coma cut to the morning scene, in which she is already passed away. Slide17
Duration
In some films discourse time, plot time last as long as narrative time or real time.
Andy Warhol’s
Empire
(1964)
Cezare
Zavattini’s
experimental omnibus film,
Love in the City
(1953)
Tre
ore di
paradisoSlide18
Duration
In the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games,
Abebe
Bikila
won the gold medal in marathon, with 2 hours12 minutes and 11 seconds (narrative time) but
Kon
Ichikdawa
showed the race in about 8 minutes (discourse time).
Tokyo Olympiad
(1965)
marathonSlide19
Duration
R
arely discourse time is longer than narrative time
Bob Hayes won the 100 meter with 10.00 seconds but the race is shown in 30
seconds
Tokyo
OlympiadeSlide20
Voice
Voice is connected with
who
narrates and
from where
Where the narration is from:
Intra-diegetic: inside the text (narrated from
the film narrative)
Extra-diegetic: outside the text (narrated from
outside film narrative)Slide21
Voice
Who narrates
:
Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character
in
a
film
Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in a
film
First person narrating and third person narrating
http://
www.slideshare.net
/
etaylorchs
/narrative-5566418Slide22
Voice
Intra-diegetic, homo-diegetic first person narrating
David Lean’s
Brief Encounter
(1945) – a housewife who is having an affair with a married doctor whom she met in a station is narrating what is going on inside herself.
Rachmaninov’s
music as a extra-diegetic element.Slide23
Voice
Extra-diegetic, hetero-diegetic third person narrating: the speaker speaks from outside the story never using ‘I
’
Stanley Kubrick’s
Barry Lyndon
is narrated by Michael
Hordern
Slide24
Mood
Mood – the various degree of ‘distance’ created between the narrator of a film and what she narrates.
Distance helps the viewer to determine the degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of information conveyed.
Unreliable narrator: the distance between a narrator and what he narrates is wide:
The narrator in
Citizen Kane –
a journalist gathering information about who Kane really is and what ‘rose bud’ really means.Slide25
Mood
Lady in the Lake
First-person perspective – the camera become the viewpoint of the film as well as a character
Robert Montgomery’s ambition to create a cinematic version of the first-person narrative of Raymond Chandler in
Lady in the Lake
(1947)