Today we looked at modular narratives as a form of story-telling in Film. Although to do this, we first had to look at more classical narrative form and theory. We talked about conventions like classical narrative cinema, restricted and unrestricted narrative and Vladimir Propp’s narrative theory where he worked with folk tales to create seven character profiles that were often prevalent in stories. We also briefly touched on Todrov’s five stage narrative.
There were four different types of modular narrative covered in the session.
- Anachronic: Flash backs/Flash forwards with no clear dominance between any narrative thread.
- Forking-Path: Showing possible outcomes that might result from small changes in an event or a group of events, introducing a number of plot lines.
- Episodic: Abstract series of films or a narrative anthology.
- Split Screen: Dividing into two or more frames, sometimes to tell different stories.
Our task this week was to pick one of the above forms and create a 60-90 second long modular narrative in small groups. I knew I wanted to do split screen as it is one form of modular narrative that I was less familiar with and it didn’t take long to come up with a story that would allow us to play with the style but also one that was doable in the short time we had to complete the task. We decided on making a short film about two different people getting ready for the same blind date at the same time with split screen, attempting the have as much synchronisation between the two different narratives/people in the film. At the end of the film, the pair would then meet and the split in the middle would disappear. We shot and edited the film the following day, and overall, I consider it to be a success. We encountered very few issues on the day as we were careful about timing the individual actions so they would match up in the edit.
“I agree that a film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order” – Jean Luc Godard
PCA Isobel Wilkinson - BA Film 