Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image to the audience?
Peter Lamarque (1994) consider all narration as involving the recounting and shaping of events. He explained that narration describe not just things, but events as well. In Huisman's words, "Just as we can describe experience only through the language we have available to us, so we make use of existing narrative patterns to structure and make sense of new experiences (Huisman, 2005, p.27). Visual images, be it movies, comics, or photographs, usually has a story to tell. Understanding how narrative works allows for better construction of visual images that makes sense to the audience. I will provide some examples below.
Ismail S Talib (2011) claimed that narratives are broadly agreed to be dualistic in nature. It is argued that narrative is made up of the story and the discourse. The story is the content of the narrative in which the main elements are actors, time, events and location. Most superhero movies these days are similar in their structure; they found their sources of power - meets villian - loses the fight - lost confidence - regains confidence - beat the villain - story ends. The only thing that differs is the location, events, time, actors. The discourse does not change.
The discourse is the style in which the narrative is told; how the narrative is arranged or what is being emphasized. The story of Snow White was about a princess being hunted under the order of an evil queen, and eventually through three attempts by the Queen, Snow White fell. In the end, Snow White was revived by Prince Charming, and they get married and lived happily ever after. but in Snow White and the Huntsman, Snow White, after escaping from imprisonment by a Queen, led a rebellion against the Queen alongside her childhood friend. But she stayed single.
In the many narrative from ancient times to present day, the structure of narrative change in two form, the paradigm and the syntagm. A paradigm works on the story part of the narrative, where one element in a configuration can be substituted with another element belonging to a similar category (Ismail, 2011). For example, switching the zombies in a horror genre to deadly locust swarm, or switching the location of a murder from abroad a spaceship to present-day cruise ship.
A syntagm is "a linear configuration which can be analysed in terms of the relationships of each of its elements in the linear configuration" (Ismail, 2011). It involves changing (configuring) the signs (elements), which generate meanings in relation to other signs that comes before and after it, which in turn changes the meaning generated. It can be seen as changing the discourse of the narrative. An example would be changing the story of the movie Transformers into making the Autobots seeking for help from a supposedly dead civilisation of Atlantis, who then provide them with aid to defeat the Decepticons.
Another component of narrative is the subject. There are two kinds of subject, the subject of speech, and the speaking subject. The subject of speech refers to whatever the narrative is talking about, while the speaking subject refers to the producer of the text . Focalisation is a component that ties closely with subject. Focalisation refers to the phenomenon of using a particular perspective in mediating a story (Hiusman, 2005). A person telling you what happened to him/her yesterday could either narrate the story from the focalisation of the past by telling it from his/her perspective at that time; or reporting it as though the present him/her had witnessed it from a bystander's point of view.
Another ingredient of narrative is temporality, but may be known as duration or spacing (Huisman, 2005). Temporality is one way that the discourse can be changed. It involves the pacing of the duration of the story and the length of the movie/novel/etc. It is deciding the length of the movie you will use to show Bruce Wayne doing his workout. And how long you want to show Batman interrogating the Joker in a 1.5hr long movie. If a fabula takes up a big percentage of the movie length, it is a significant part of the narrative. In novels it would mean dedicating page after page to a particular scene or topic.
Knowing how narrative works will help in producing one that does not tick the audience off, and helps in telling a better story to help in selling an idea or product.
References:
Huisman, R. (2005). Narrative concepts. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. and Dunn, A. (eds.), Narrative and Media (pp. 11-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ismail S Talib (2011). Chapter 1: Definitions of Narrative. Narrative Theory: A Brief Introduction. Retrieved November 17, 2012 from http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellibst/NarrativeTheory/chapt1.htm
Lamarque, P. (1994). Narrative and invention: The limits of fictionality. In Nash. C. (ed.), Narrative in culture (pp. 131-132). New York and London: Routledge.
No comments:
Post a Comment