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The narration of these actions may vary considerably:
One film could use an omniscient narration--
which presents the elements of the plot from potentially any possible angle.
Another film uses a restricted narration, which limits what is shown and known to one or two characters.
Most of the films we view in this class will feature restricted narration.
NARRATION:
When most of us refer to the movies, we are referring to narrative movies alone, not documentaries or experimental films.
A narrative can be divided into different components:
• The story is all the events that are presented to us or that we can infer have happened.
• The plot is the arrangement or construction of those events in a certain order or structure.
• Narration refers to the perspective that organizes the plot according to a certain emotional, physical, or intellectual point of view.
Character Analysis
Do the characters change, and if so, in what ways? What values do the characters seem to represent? What do they say about such matters as independence, sexuality, and political belief?
You can begin by asking yourself if the characters seem, or are meant to seem, realistic. What makes them realistic? Are they defined by their clothes, their conversation, or something else? If they are not realistic, why not, and why are they meant to seem strange or fantastic? Do the characters seem to fit the setting of the story? Does the movie focus mainly on one or two characters?
POINT OF VIEW
Like narrative, point of view is a term that film shares with the literary and visual arts. In the broadest sense, it refers to the position from which something is seen and, by implication, the way that point of view determines what you see. In the simplest sense, the point of view is purely physical.
Avoid taking characters at face value. Remain attuned to the variety in character types and constructions, you can begin to see subtleties and complications in how characters function and what they mean in different films.
Characters focus the action and the theme of the film. Consider...
HOW DO THE EVENTS OF A FILM CHANGE A CHARACTER?
IS A CHARACTER GENERALLY THE SAME AT THE END OF A FILM AS SHE WAS AT THE BEGINNING?
What kind of changes have taken root in her personality?
However, sometimes the camera is recreating a specific individual’s more subjective point of view. This is, again, especially evident in dream sequences, flash backs and flash forwards though there are other ways to identify when the point of view is subjective.
Dream Sequence:
Flash Back:
Settings and Sets
Most of the films we view in this class, despite being of the horror genre, feature attributes of the classic narrative:
• A plot development in which there is a logical relation between one event and another.
• A sense of closure at the end (for example, a happy or a tragic
ending).
• Stories that are focused on characters.
• A narration that attempts to be more or less objective or realistic. Note, this does not mean the STORY IN ITSELF is necessarily realistic—only the style of TELLING that story. For example, we would hardly state the concept of the film Alien is a realistic one. However, the space travel and the mission of Ripley’s fellow crew are rendered realistically and told in a chronological format.
Let’s look at the significance of setting in Stephen King’s THE SHINING:
Does the way a story is told become a prominent feature of the film, and thus, a central factor in an analysis of it?
Is the movie especially concerned with questions of time and history, which may, in turn, influence how the plot is constructed through, for instance, flashbacks or, more rarely, flashforwards?
What propels the story? When looking at flash back or flashforward scenes, pay special attention to the character engaged in the recall or projection.
It will help you identify whether the films narration is omniscient or restrictive. Generally speaking, a film that features flashback and flashfoward scenes will be narratively restrictive.
Settings and sets refer to the location or the construction of a location where a scene is filmed. In some movies, you will notice immediately how important the setting and sets are. One might make the same case for a movie such as Alien (1979), in which the elaborately twisted passageways of the spaceship and the mysterious construction in which the characters discover the alien eggs reverberate with a symbolic significance associated with women and motherhood.
Point of view is a central term in writing about films because films are basically about seeing the world in a certain way. Pay attention to point of view by using these two general guidelines:
1. Observe how and when the camera creates the point of view of a character.
2. Notice if the story is told mostly from an objective point of view or from the subjective perspective of one person.
• Who are the central characters?
• What do they represent in themselves and in relation to each
other? The importance of individuality or society? Human strength or human compassion?
• How do their actions create a story with a meaning or constellation of meanings?
• Does the story emphasize the benefits of change or endurance?
• What kind of life or what actions does the film wish you to value
or criticize, and why?
• If there is not a coherent message or story, why not?
• How does the movie make you feel at the end? Happy? Depressed? Confused? Why?
The major reason that we tend to overlook or undervalue mise-en-scène in the movies is the powerful illusion of realism that is at the heart of the film medium. The illusion of realism, in short, is a kind of mise-en-scène that makes us believe that the images are of an everyday world that is simply “there”—one we know and are familiar with.
You must learn, however, to be suspicious of realism in the movies because it can distract you from the many interesting possibilities that mise-en-scène analysis offers. The reality of a movie is constructed for a purpose. Simply putting a camera in front of a scene, as one writer has noted, changes the most realistic situation into a kind of theatrical setting.
In writing about setting, however, one must do more than just describe it: One must seek to discover its significance in relation to the major themes of the film or to other aspects of the film. This focus will help explain why the setting and the way it is constructed are important.
A writer interested in the use of sets and settings should start with these questions:
• Do the objects and props in the setting, whether natural ones (such as rivers and trees) or artificial ones (such as paintings and buildings), have a special significance that relates to the characters or story?
• Does the arrangement of objects, props, and characters within that setting have some significance?
Good films give the setting and its objects nearly as much meaning as the characters, films differ greatly in how they use their settings in relation to characters and stories.
Costumes, as we all know, are the clothes the characters wear. Like other aspects of the mise-en-scène, they vary along a spectrum from realistic to extravagant; often, they provide a writer with the key to a character’s identity. Do their costumes suggest how they view themselves, or how they wish to be viewed by others?
The mise-en-scène, a French term roughly translated as “what is put into the scene” (put before the camera), refers to all those proper-ties of a cinematic image that exist independently of camera position, camera movement, and editing (although a viewer will see these different dimensions united in one image). Mise-en-scène includes lighting, costumes, sets, the quality of the acting, and other shapes and characters in the scene.
Mise-en-scène, then, is about the theatrics of space as that space is constructed for the camera.
This use of space—how it is arranged and how the actors and objects relate within it—can generate exciting topics and commentary on film. The balance or imbalance that relates figures or various planes in the mise-en-scène sometimes says more about that action than does the dialogue: Is, for instance, one character always positioned above another? Is one always in shadows?
Wipe: A line moves across an image to gradually clear one shot
and introduce another.
Dissolve: A new shot is briefly superimposed on the fading old
shot.
When these techniques are used in a movie, ask what they are
meant to achieve. Used in older movies, they create logical transi-
tions from one time or place to another.
Ask yourself in what ways the point of view is determining what you see. Does it limit or control your vision in any way? What can you tell about the characters whose eyes you see through? Are they aggressive? Suspicious? Clever? In love?
Always ask yourself how the narrative of the film you are watching is constructed. Is it, first of all, a movie with a story line? If not, why not? For the purposes of this class, all of the films we view will feature a pretty straight forward story line, as classic horror films have their roots in American Gothic storytelling, which is usually chronological and plot focused. In addition to being HIGHLY moralistic..
Also ask yourself…Are there reasons for including some material and omitting other material? Be aware that sometimes, a film will TELL you something happened, but refuse to show that scene (this happens in The Exorcist, for sure—at one point, Regan throws a character out a window. We never see it happen, but we learn of it later on in the story. It happens to be a very significant, yet never shown moment.) Consider why a scene might be omitted.
THEME:
Theme is much more complicated than a simple plot summary, or evil a single word like “evil”. For example, the theme of Stephen King’s The Shining might be perceived as the destructive effects of untreated Alcoholism on the American family.
Movie themes, in many cases, become the foundation for an analysis because they point to the main ideas in a movie. They are not, strictly speaking, the “moral” of a story.
FRAME:
Frame refers to the rectangle that contains the image: the frame of the movie screen itself, which does not change during a movie, and more importantly, the camera frame, which regularly changes its relationship to the objects being filmed.