Introduction to Film Studies

Film Form and Film Style

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 reveals

Order

• Citizen Kane (1941) begins with the death of the newspaper magnate. A journalist interviews Kane’s friends and associates and unfolds his story in flashbacks.

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.

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.

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. The action of her descending into a tube station shown twice.

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 time

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

minutes

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.

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 paradiso

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) marathon

Duration• Rarely 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 Olympiade

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)

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

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.

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

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.

Mood

Lady in the Lake

• First-person perspective – the camera become the viewpoint of the film as well as a character

• Cinema version of the first-person narrative in Lady in the Lake (1947) the distance between a narrator and what he narrates is so close.