“Narrative”, as stated by Bordwell and Thompson (B&T), is the “way that humans make sense of the world”. We understand narrative situations, or “chain of events” as cause-effect relationships occurring in time and space.
In our daily life we might refer to narrative as “story”, however a difference between both terms must be made in order to avoid confusions. According to B&T, as viewers we are able to infer information that might not be explicitly presented, and in order to describe how we are able to make such connections they suggest an examination of the terms plot and story.
Plot is then the term used to describe all that is present in the film, both visible and audible. It includes, all the story events that are depicted in a direct manner and all material that is extraneous to the story world.
In order to make their point B&T introduce the term diegesis, which is a term used originally in literary theory and encompasses the world in which the story takes place. The term is important to recognize, as we need to understand that there are certain elements that appear in the films’ plot that are sometimes external to the diegesis. We call such elements non-diegetic.
By non-diegetic we mostly understand those elements that are foreign to the characters in the film and are only recognized by the viewers. Credits, music and voice over narration are often (and mostly) non-diegetic elements. In The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, music plays a very important role in the film. Sometimes the music happens within the diegeis, but mostly it happens in a non-diegetic manner and since the characters in the movie are unaware of the narration and the music (in most cases – one exception is when we find Margot listening to the Rolling Stones’ She Smiled Sweetly in Richie’s tent) we say that such elements are non-diegetic.
Story is used to describe that all the events in the narrative, even those that happen outside the plot. To explain this B&T refer to the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest where the opening images are those of New York during rush hour. We are then transported to the lobby of an office building where an executive is giving his secretary instructions while rushes out of the elevator. As viewers we make all kinds of connections, NY is a busy city, executives are very busy people, the story takes place in this context, the character must be wealthy for he has a personal assistant, etc, etc. Most of the time we are not aware of all the connection we are making, but the director is counting on our associations in order for the movie to make sense. Some films are less explicit than others; The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, is set in New York, but Anderson chooses to shot his movie away from the tourist sites in order to give the audiences a different sense of New York, different to the one its usually associated with.
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”.
“From the standpoint of the storyteller (the filmmaker), the story is the sum total of all events in the narrative”. The filmmaker can choose to present such events in a direct manner or expect the audience to infer them. He can also chose to ignore other events (in The Royal Tenembams we are never told where Margo got married, and whether or not she got married in a church – on the other hand, the director may have chosen to omit this information because he thought it wasn’t relevant to the story). The filmmaker can also chose to add non-diegetic material that might affect the way we understand the story. As audiences we are forced to make sense of the events that are presented to us in the plot and we need to make sense of such events in order to understand the story. In other words, we are recreating the story in our minds.
As mentioned earlier, narrative depends on as cause-effect relationships occurring in time and space. It is usually the characters play the role of “agents” in this cause and effect situations. In some films, like The Royal Tenenbaums) the characters are central to the story because the film focuses on their lives and their stories. In other films, like The Fugitive, The Bourne Identity, or Minority Report, what is central to the narrative is not the necessarily how the character feels or the events that shape his life, but the solving the crime/mystery, etc.
Time takes a key role in the way we understand the story. A viewer might be exposed to situations that happen outside the chronological order, however, such reordering does not confuse the spectator as one usually rearranges the events (in one’s head) into the order in which they would probably have occurred. Flashback is a term commonly used in film and it alludes to the moments in the narrative when the character thinks back to a particular moment in time. Note that while the character is merely thinking about the moment, we as audiences, are taken back to the moment itself. When Margo tells Uzi and Ari about how she lost her finger her voice vanishes and gives way to the images of her and her blood family back in Indiana.
The temporal duration plays also a central role in the film and sometimes it also affects the pace of the film itself. B&T refer to three different temporal durations within a movie: 1 – the duration of the story (we meet the Tenembaum 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), 2 – the duration of the plot (the time frame of the plot is perhaps a year from the moment that Royal fakes his illness to the moment when he actually dies), and 3 – the screen duration, which is the actual screening time of the movie (110 minutes).
Another important factor in film narrative is space. In The Royal Tenenbaums for example, the house, the character’s bedrooms and the places they chose to visit are of great relevance and importance to the story. This aspect of filmmaking will be addressed in depth when reviewing the shot, cinematography and the mise en scene.
The Narrator and the flow of information
Another key element that we must identify in our film viewing process is the narrator. There are a few key elements that can help us decipher what kind of narrator is leading us through the viewing process. In some cases we have more than one narrator, like in The Royal Tenenbaums, where both the voice over and the images play a role in the narrating process.
As viewers we might also be aware or unaware of certain things that can affect the characters and the story. This awareness, or unawareness is central to the development of story but could well be withheld from the plot. The situation is also explained by B&T in the diagram on page 64 where it clearly shows how certain events can be part of the story without necessarily taking active part in the plot. The flow of information can be unrestricted, which means that the audience knows information that the characters themselves have no access to (BT equates this to the role of the omniscient narrator) or it can chose to restrict the information to what the characters know at any given time of the film.
Apart from keeping an eye on who, how, and when the information is disclosed, one should also pay attention to how deep are we able to enter the character’s psychology. “Just as there is a spectrum between restricted and unrestricted narration, there is a continuum between objectivity and subjectivity”. (73)
The filmmaker may also choose to use a narrator to tell the story. This narrator can be a character telling the story of his life (like in Fight Club – interesting example because he only knows as so far in the movie – as if time caught up with him) or a non-character narrator in the form of voice-over, as in The Royal Tenenbaums. Either kind of narrator may chose to disclose or withhold information, a resource used by filmmakers to twist story plots or to create suspense.
Point of view shot refers to the shots taken from a particular character’s point of view. Meaning that we see, hear and feel how the character is seeing, feeling and hearing. This is why the famous shot of Jodie Foster entering the hiding place of the killer in The Silence of the Lambs is so freaky. We are seeing her lost in the dark while we look at her through the killer’s eyes, wearing a night vision lens. BT identify this point of view as subjective and refer to it as perceptual subjectivity. BT also identify the mental subjectivity which is a resource filmmakers use to plunge into a particular character’s mind. In doing so we, as audiences, are able to see the things that go through his mind, his fears, his thoughts, etc.
During the course of the semester we will address some of the terms and definitions that are elucidated in BT’s text. For the time being we can conclude by saying that narration is the “moment-to-moment process that guides us in building the story out of the plot” (70) or the “process by which the plot presents story information to the spectator” (74).
** notes on the third chapter of Film Art: An Introduction (David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson)
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