Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Narrative in Films

Narrative is the art of storytelling, something we all do every day. It is an important part of our lives and something that we value highly, if you consider the amount of time we all spend in front of television and cinema screens receiving narratives.

People often talk about film and television as if they are the same thing, but in fact they are very different in a number of ways.

In the cinema we are generally in a state of intense and relatively sustained attention. Think about this for a moment. The average film is about two hours long- a very long time to concentrate and yet there is something about the cinema which gives a film in this setting the power to take us over for this amount of time. Again think about the situation at home in front of the TV when you probably have all kinds of things distracting you from what you are trying to watch.

While many sorts of films employ some storytelling strategies, when we speak of narrative film we are typically referring to fiction films.

The typical Hollywood film, according to Field can be separated into three separate dramatic sections or acts: the setup, the confrontation and finally resolution.

The Godfather series is been one of the most outstanding narrative films everywhere, showing the real story of something that happened many years ago.

1 comment:

  1. you're right.. films are carefully thought through. practically every shot has been planned out to create that "state of intense and relatively sustained attention" if their is a camera movement generally its been motivated by the story as opposed to Certain types of TV like Reality Shows.

    reality tv is more along the lines of shoot as much as you can and lets cut the show so fast you wont be bored. the suspense built in these 2 instances are far different from each other

    Some shows are produced like a film and do the same attention grabbing techniques as films do

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