How
to Understand Film Narrative?
1. How do the channels of information in
film--visual image, print and other graphics, speech, music, sound
effects--work together to communicate the narrative? Which channel is dominant?
2. How is the story told? (linear,
with flashbacks, flash forwards, episodically?)
3. Is there a recognizable source of the
narration? Voice-over
or off-screen commentary? What is
the narrator's perspective?
4. Does the film acknowledge the spectator or do
events transpire as if no one were present?Â
Do characters look into the camera or pretend it is not there, for
instance?
5. Does the film reflect on its "constructedness"
by breaking the illusion of a self-sufficient "story apparently told by
nobody"? Are there intertitles,
film-within-film sequences, obtrusive and self-conscious ("un-realistic")
camera movements calling attention to the fact that the film is a construct?
6. How does the film position the viewer
vis-a-vis the on-screen events? Are we
made to favor certain characters, to respond in certain ways to certain events
(say, through music that "tells" us how to respond or distances us
from the action)? Does the film appeal to certain expectations, i.e., generic
conventions? (We expect a man dressed in
black shrouded in a shadow to be sinister, for instance.)Â Does the film subvert these conventions or
conform to them? What kind of
conventions are they? Does the film play
with certain genre expectations (comedy, melodrama, western, science fiction,
documentary, etc.)?