GUESSES AND SURPRISES

Transcription

1 NARRATIVE AND HYPERMEDIA GUESSES AND SURPRISES Paul Klee, Angelus Novus A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, from Illuminations

2 Benjamin s response to the painting begins from a very familiar, perhaps universal human curiosity. What is the angel looking at? What has it seen that makes it look so startled? What is there away off the edge of the screen that it is looking at? In moving image media, off-screen space can serve a very similar function. If we see a character react to something offscreen, we want to know what they re looking at. If we hear a sound, we want to know what caused it. If a voice calls, we want to know who s speaking. Stories often revolve around enigmas. The same is true of the microscale of stroytelling.

3 Who are these people, where are they, how did they get here? Do they know each other? Will they know each other? Where is everyone else? These small questions pop up constantly as we watch a TV drama or film narrative. There are the big questions (will she kill get shot? will he get the girl?) and there are the small questions (will she remember where she put her keys? Does he know how to make cappucino?) These kinds of questions form a central part of neo-formalist film analysis, especially in the work of David Bordwell and Edward Brannigan.

4 FABULA the fabula [story] embodies the action as a chronological cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field... The fabula is thus a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. It is the developing result of picking up narrative cues, applying schemata, framing and testing hypotheses SCHEMATA The viewer builds the fabula on the basis of protoype schemata (identifiable types of persons, actions, locales, etc), template schemata (principally the canonic story) and procedural schemata (a search for appropriate motivations and relations of causality, time and space).. In principle all viewers will agree about either what the story is or what factors obscure or render ambiguous the adequate construction of the story SYUZHET The syuzhet (usually translated as plot ) is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film... it is the patterning of the story as a blow-by-blow recoiunting of the film would render it.. Logically, syuzhet patterning is independent of the medium FABULA-syuzhet the twofold development of the action, as it objectively and straightforwardly progresses in the fictive world from beginning to end (within the fabula) and as it is deformed and patterned into progressing in our mind during the reading process (within the syuzhet) Meir Sternberg, cited in Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film. All quotes from pages 49-51

5 To sum up, in any narrative text in any medium, the syuzhet controls the amount and degree of pertinence of the information we receive. The syuzhet creates various sorts of gaps in our construction of the fabula; it also combines information according to principles of retardation and redundancy. All of these procedures function to cue and guide the spectator s narrative activity (Bordwell) fabula cause of crime commission of crime concealment of crime discovery of crime identification of criminal punishment of criminal SYUzHET discovery of crime beginning investigation phases of investigation elucidation of crime identification of criminal punishment of criminal

6 fiction Truth is deferred in order to be judged within a variety of (new) non-standard contexts. Fictive meaning is typically judged not on the basis of a sentence or a proposition, but on the basis of a discourse, of a network of sentences and propositions.... when a film is experienced fictionally, reference is not to the pro-filmic event in which a set is decorated and an actor given direction, but rather to a post-filmic event in which patterns are discovered through active perceiving that affects the overall structure of our knowledge Edward Brannigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film

7 NARRATION Narration refers to a mechanism that determines how narrative information is conveyed to the film spectator There are two dominant modes of filmic narration omniscient narration and restricted narration Whereas restricted narration conveys the narrative to the spectator via one particular character (thus aligning the spectator to that character), leading to a sense of mystery, Omniscient narration shifts from one character to another, conveying narrative information to the spectator from many sources. This creates a discrepancy in knowledge between the spectator and characters, for the spectator knows more narrative information than any one character, creating scenes of dramatic suspense. Warren Buckland, TY Film Studies