Film Narrative

En los primeros años del siglo XXI, el documental mexicano ha incrementado sus niveles de producción, distribución y exhibición, llamando la atención de nuevos espectadores pues ha diversificado notablemente sus temas y ha aprovechado los recursos narrativos del cine de ficción. En casi todos los festivales de cine en el país hay un espacio para el documental. De hecho, algunos de los más prestigiosos están dedicados íntegramente al cine documental, y en ellos se presenta lo más destacado de la producción mundial. Se vuelve necesario dialogar desde la academia, con una mirada plural e interdisciplinaria, sobre los temas, las narrativas, los discursos, de esos documentales que en variadas formas representan las identidades, los intereses, las preocupaciones, las formas de vida en México; lo que precisamente tiene el lector en sus manos.

How do we write stories for interactivity? From a storyteller's perspective, the notion of interactivity challenges the traditional conception of telling stories, defined by an author-driven narrative and a receptive audience. Interactive technologies have pushed the boundaries of those traditional rules, giving storytellers the opportunity to question, redefine and play with conventions almost two thousand years old. This ongoing research focuses on how are our traditional storytelling techniques and strategies affected by the emergence of interactive media, and on how do we adapt what we already know about narrative into an interactive storytelling. 'The Hunter & the Wolff' is an interactive, plot-driven, loose adaptation of the traditional tale 'Little Red Riding Hood', which aims to test the idea of hands-off interactive storytelling in Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), by using the Object Based Media (OBM) approach to contents built with reconfigurable prerendered assets. This paper reflects on the process of writing and design of an interactive story within the mentioned frame. It specifically focuses on the development of two elements: a script and a hands-off interactive model for CVR, developed simultaneously to reinforce the narrative and interactive concepts in both media. From a narratologist's perspective, this project explores the possibility of an interactivity that gives users agency over the storytelling devices and techniques instead of affecting characters and environment, what I'm calling On-Narration Interactivity. This creative writing and design process approached the limitations for interactivity in CVR through spatial storytelling techniques; Designing a reconfigurable soundscape with OBM with both dramatic and interactive purposes; Writing a story that facilitates a leaned-back hands-off interactivity and Proposing a type of interactivity based on instant and instinctive reactions. All these challenges merge together in the proposal of an On-Narration Interactivity, aimed to give users the agency to affect the narration instead of the storyworld.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television "reality" show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it by suggesting that such binaries exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

Literaturverfilmungen sind populär: Mindestens die Hälfte aller jemals gedrehten Filme geht auf eine literarische Vorlage zurück. Dieser Band stellt geeignete Werkzeuge und Verfahren vor, um den Medienwechsel vom Buch zum Film im Deutschunterricht zu analysieren. Am Beispiel von klassischen Schullektüren (Goethes Werther, Kleists Marquise von O…, Kafkas Process, Süskinds Parfum) und ihren Verfilmungen werden schriftliterarisches und filmisches Erzählen gegenübergestellt.

The book aims to effectively describe, explore and explain serial fiction. Provided approach – serial fiction poetics – aims to (1) present a systemic explanation of serial fiction, (2) capture a variability of artistic possibilities of serial narrative and, (3) offer tools for the analysis of actual serial works. Its concept of seriality serves as foundation for the first and second aims; it remains as mere background for analytical hypotheses with regard to the third aim. Serial fiction poetics assumes the presence of a space-time continuum, which is created by the work through interaction with its audience. This is process is termed a fictional macroworld: narrated stories take place within its conditions and settings. Each episode of a serial constitutes an episodic world; seriality denotes a relationship between the state of affairs in a macroworld at the end of a current episode and the state of affairs in the macroworld at the end of the previous one. Depending on the intensity of connectedness between these two states and the relations of fictional characters to them, the book presents a typology of seriality, which serves as a functional and heuristic categorization, yet not as a substantive one: a separate, a non-sequential, a semisequential, a sequential, a disrupted. The book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book gives a systemic explanation of seriality, using the five types top-down. The second part of the book explores variable possibilities of serial narrative. The third part of the book attempt to offer the greatest possible degree of aesthetic sensitivity towards those works analysed and those explanations presented. The three parts develop and transform, with respect to these three aims, which differ from each other but are also interrelated, only to answer the questions posed, in correspondence with the individual dimensions of serial fiction poetics, in ways that are at the same time systematic and aesthetically sensitive.
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Každý den čteme, posloucháme či sledujeme všeliká vyprávění na pokračování, která se vracejí k týmž postavám, příběhům či světům. Jak jsou vystavěna? Kterak vedou naši pozornost? Lze jim vůbec porozumět coby samostatným dílům? Odpovědi hledá filmový teoretik Radomír D. Kokeš (autor knihy Rozbor filmu) na příkladu televizních seriálů, jež vysvětluje právě skrze jejich vnitřní uspořádání, práci s divákem a hledání jednotného přístupu k různorodým dílům. Výklad je rozdělen do tří oddílů a jeho názornost posiluje množství rozmanitých příkladů, dílčích rozborů i rozsáhlejších podrobných analýz seriálů, které čtenář zná či možná bude chtít poznat. Kniha Světy na pokračování nabízí zcela nový pohled na fenomén seriálového vyprávění, jímž může zaujmout odborníky stejně jako fanoušky.

ABSTRACT:
This paper analyses, within a perspective of interactions connecting female memory, city and everyday events, the long feature film Aquarius (Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). The dwelling is the foundation to the conflicts of the protagonist Clara. The Casetti and Di Chio method (2007) was chosen as inspiration for the three levels in which the methodology of analysis regarding the film’s narrative will be approached. The analytical categories “city”, “collective space”, “old age women”, “habitational matters”, “memories” and “everyday events” reside at the core of this analysis. City and the female body are shuffled in the experiences of public spaces and the fear that crosses and limits the relationship between private and collective space.

Keywords: Aquarius. City. Gender. Affects. Everyday life. Sexuality. Symbolic violence.

RESUMO:
Este paper analisa, sob uma perspectiva de interações entre memória, cidade, corpo e cotidianidade feminina, o longa metragem Aquarius (Brasil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). O espaço do habitar alicerça a construção do protagonismo dos conflitos da personagem Clara. A metodologia de análise da narrativa fílmica foi desenvolvida em três níveis inspirados no método de Casetti e Di Chio (2007). As categorias " cidade " , " espaço coletivo " , " velhice feminina " , " questões habitacionais " , " memórias " e " cotidianidades " agregam o eixo central desta análise. A cidade e o feminino se embaralham na vivência do espaço público e do medo que atravessa e limita a relação entre o espaço privado e coletivo. Abstract This paper analyses, within a perspective of interactions connecting female memory, city and everyday events, the long feature film Aquarius (Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). The dwelling is the foundation to the conflicts of the protagonist Clara. The Casetti and Di Chio method (2007) was chosen as inspiration for the three levels in which the methodology of analysis regarding the film's narrative will be approached. The analytical categories " city " , " collective space " , " old age women " , " habitational matters " , " memories " and " everyday events " reside at the core of this analysis. City and the female body are shuffled in the experiences of public spaces and the fear that crosses and limits the relationship between private and collective space.

In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood’s own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period’s inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.

In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood’s formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. I will argue that The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it. The Truman Show proposes that binary oppositions such as outside/inside exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

Partindo do conceito de de "disnarrativo" ("dysnarration"), tal como formulado por Alain Robbe-Grillet em 1976 e publicado no "Le Monde" de 26 de Fevereiro desse ano, pretendo abordar uma das práticas narrativas mais mistificadoras do cinema moderno e pós-moderno, na qual a história, ao mesmo tempo que se vai contando, se nega a si mesma. O efeito é obtido por recurso a três linhas narrativas ("séries"), as quais se entrecruzam durante o tempo do filme, gerando personagens, locais e situações verdadeiramente "incompossíveis" (ou seja, como defende Deleuze, possíveis em si mesmas mas não quando combinadas umas com as outras). Esta estrutura narrativa ("telestrutura") relança constantemente a história, dotando-a de uma natureza alegórica superior à descritiva (tanto mais que os filmes são enriquecidos por meio de citações artísticas intermediais). O efeito é paradoxal - a de uma história impossível que se vai criando sob os nossos olhos - e o resultado é um autêntico labirinto fílmico. Cabe ao espectador tentar descodificar a obra, tarefa obviamente votada ao malogro por efeito da própria construção. A prática disnarrativa de Alain Robbe-Grillet será exemplificada no filme de 1983, sempre actual devido ao enigma abstracto que o permeia. Refiro-me a  "La Belle captive" (FRA).

This article analyses the use of film style in Rashomon (1950) to determine if the different accounts of the rape and murder provided by the bandit, the wife, the husband, and the woodcutter are formally distinct by comparing shot length data and using multiple correspondence analysis to look for relationships between shot scale, camera movement, camera angle, and the use of point-of-view shots, reverse-angle cuts, and axial cuts. The results show that the four accounts of the rape and the murder in Rashomon differ not only in their content but also in the way they are narrated. The editing pace varies so that although the action of the film is repeated the presentation of events to the viewer is different each time. There is a distinction between presentational (shot scale and camera movement) and perspectival (shot types) aspects of style depending on their function within the film, while other elements (camera angle) fulfil both these functions. Different types of shot are used to create the narrative perspectives of the bandit, the wife, and the husband that marks them out as either active or passive narrators reflecting their level of narrative agency within the film, while the woodcutter’s account exhibits both active and passive aspects to create an ambiguous mode of narration. Rashomon is a deliberately and precisely constructed artwork in which form and content work together to create an epistemological puzzle for the viewer.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television "reality" show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it by suggesting that such binaries exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

Пересмотр корпуса текстов, обозначенных «Мэй Уэст», и присвоение их разными группами зрителей, иногда пересекающимися, а иногда и нет, наталкивает на обсуждение вопроса о соотношении перечтения (присвоения) кинотекстов или их элементов и (историзованной) структуры самого кинотекста. Феминистски ориентированные авторы усматривают в «Мэй Уэст» трансгрессию, которая полагается основным потенциалом чтения, подрывающего когерентность классического киноповествования и переключающего фильмы с Мэй Уэст в иные культурные режимы и ряды,
например, кэмпа или феминизма. Меня же далее будет интересовать, как можно совместить словарь культурных исследований и словарь кинонарратологии, прежде всего, в понятии «нарративного эксцесса». То есть—как можно обнаружить задатки «кэмповости» и, шире, «культовости» задним числом в нарративном устройстве фильма.
Само название статьи указывает на классическую работу Бориса Эйхенбаума «Как сделана “Шинель” Гоголя» (1919), и тем самым я в какой-то степени расписываюсь в консервативности своих целей—«назад к нарратологии». Однако проблема трансгрессивного ресурса, элементов структуры кинотекста, разрывов и эксцессов, позволяющих переозначить его, может быть сформулирована и иначе—«вперед к культовости».

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest no sólo fue un
gran entretenimiento. Detrás de este gran éxito del 2006 hay
mucha tela para cortar: Desde su apego a la tradición del cine
de piratas hasta su lógica de videojuego, las aventuras de
Jack Sparrow merecen revisarse más allá del simple
blockbuster que muchos críticos quisieron ver.

The book Transcendental Style in Film, written in 1972 by future film director Paul Schrader, offers perhaps the most extensive analysis of how a particular film style might have a specifically religious significance. The article provides a critical discussion of Schrader’s theory, with a particu- lar focus on the films of Carl Th. Dreyer. Schrader’s ideas are compared to alternative explanations of the same stylistic features provided by David Bordwell and Torben Grodal. The article concludes that while Schrader identifies a number of pertinent stylistic features, the ‘transcendental film’ is better understood as a subset of the art film mode. Torben Grodal’s description of the intertwined effect of a salient (often abstract) style and thematic content indicative of higher meaning, coupled with the contribution of a suitably disposed spectator, is, the article argues, more plausible than Schrader’s analysis.

This article focuses on the films HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017) and HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U (2019). Both handle the spiral narrative, which is recognised by the article as a specific storytelling pattern with a protagonist stuck in an iterative segment of space, time and causality – and this protagonist is not only fully aware of this situation but also tries to deal with it. What for other unaware characters is a closed loop is for the protagonist an open experience with an odd number of turns of time spiral. The spiral narrative is known mostly from high-budget films such as GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) or EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014). Nevertheless, as the article explains, it occurs in dozens of other theatrical films, VOD films, television films or television shows. However, what are the reasons why, when there is an extensive set of works to choose from, does the article takes just the doublet of HAPPY DEATH DAY films? (1) On their example, the article discusses author's general hypothesis about spiral narrative works as a series of applications of the innovative narrative schema as an aesthetic tool. Such a hypothesis consists of three broader dimensions: (a) the aesthetic dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as a part of the art work; (b) the creative dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as part of the problem-solution process of filmmaking; (c) the production dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as a part of the competition of audiovisual production. (2) An even more important reason, though, for selecting just these two films has been the fact that HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U is a sequel of HAPPY DEATH DAY. In the "post-classical era" of global franchises, sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots and transmedia storytellings, this does not seem to be exceptional. However, in the context of the spiral narrative, this is an unprecedented step that raises several questions the article asks.

Review by Ruth Ronen, from Poetics Today
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772657
Twenty-odd years after T. Todorov coined the term "narratology," the area denoted by this term reveals a most heterogeneous reality: of conflicting traditions,
incompatible specialized terms, and intractable bibliographies. It is the aim of Narrative as Communicationb oth to provide a coherent picture of the field of narratology and, at the same time, to recover a plausible principle of organization for it. Coste draws up an inventory of analytic tools and concepts,
from the transformational model to literariness, fictionality, and subjects of narrative utterances, showing that these can constitute a workable apparatus for the study of narrative, although not in the terms in which they were originally
conceived. The new grounds on which one should conceive these tools and concepts are those of a theory of social communication. Coste's working hypothesis is that narrative formulates a special type of communicative act in which a transitive view of the world is the effect imparted by the message produced. A message is narrative, not because of the mode of conveying it, but because it carries narrative meaning. A communication is narrative regardless
of the form it takes (verbal or otherwise); narrative makes an object of knowledge of a narrative type for its recipients. But, for Coste, portraying a narratology in the alternative terms of a theory of communication does not suffice. His aim is to alert users of narratology to the ideological, political, and ethical implications of interpretive schemata on which they rely; it is, in other words, the history of narratology that has to be taken into account when constructing a communication-based narratology. When existing narratologies are treated as works in progress and as indispensable bases for working toward a new stage in the history of the field, this requires close scrutiny of the various controversies that have developed within narratology over the years.
In the same way that the text produced in narrative communication is always a present, living object of knowledge, so is the field of narratology not to be
discarded or treated as an obsolete document buried in history.
Successive chapters in Coste's book are dedicated to examining the relations between individual narrative utterances and macronarrative significance through textual communication; to coming to grips with the literariness of literary communication; to placing the rhetoric of reference within a theory of narrative; to studying narrative agents and the problem of agential functions as narrative types; to the operations (of reading and inscribing) pertinent to
the representation of enunciation in narrative; to the possibility of constructing a narrative syntax (in Coste's conception this cannot be a syntax of deep structures of actions, but a model of operations that takes into account the
surface of textual communication); to genres as a sociohistorical constraint in narrative discourse; and to the differences between narrative and didactic worlds and messages.

From the back cover:

"‘Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' represents an advanced, sophisticated, extremely well informed and challenging contribution to the rapidly growing area of film-philosophy scholarship. It will become an important moment in (re)establishing the philosophical significance of cinema (and film studies’ efforts in addressing this) well before the current trend in Anglo-American Philosophy’s 'discovering' of film emerged. . . . Ford draws on a wide range of research across film, modernist cultural and aesthetic theory and continental philosophical terrains. The work engages both with more recent film-philosophy scholarship and the disciplinary resources of film studies work on the movements and individual filmmakers in question. A successful and important contribution to scholarship on these films, their historical and aesthetic significance and their capacity to 'do' philosophy."
— Patrick Crogan, University of the West of England, UK

"Often, work in this area is far too devoted to a particular theoretical corpus and tends to lose originality; alternatively it falls into being a merely impressionistic mention of philosophy to make otherwise unremarkable claims. Hamish Ford’s book is remarkable for its engagement with the deepest problems of modernist aesthetics and the presentation of time. He works closely with cinema, philosophy and criticism while always maintaining his own argumentative position."
— Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA
                                                     
"Hamish Ford’s energetic and erudite work is both theoretically and historically engaged and highly accessible to a broad readership. He is ideally positioned to contribute significantly to the discussion of post-war European cinema through this important book."
— Adrian Danks, RMIT University, Australia, co-editor of Senses of Cinema

'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' is a unique study of four feature films chosen as emblematic works of 1960s modernist cinema. 'Persona' (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) are explored through the theme of negativity, while 'L’eclisse' (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) and 'Last Year in Marienbad' (Alain Resnais, 1961) are examined for their violent rendering of time. The book argues that these films exemplify film modernism at its peak of philosophical interest, substance and significance. Its focused analysis of four emblematic works selectively draws on the work of German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Adorno, in particular his account of negativity, and French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of temporality in post-war cinema, amongst other theoretical and critical sources. Grounding this study is a close consideration of the critical and aesthetically remarkable gaze these particular films cast upon their immediate social real and modernities as presented on screen. But rather than a strictly historical analysis, the book suggests that such complex and profoundly ambivalent renderings of the modern world have much to say to us today via what amounts to a genuinely challenging return in digital form, the films' remarkable aesthetic surfaces and layers looking even more properly science fiction-like than ever. 'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' will appeal both to an academic audience, from upper-level undergraduate through to career researcher level, and a wider readership attracted by the book’s extensive analysis and appreciation of films that have countless and increasing admirers the world over."

Published review: Michael Godard, Senses of Cinema, July 2016, Issue 79, online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/book-reviews/post-war-modernist-cinema-and-philosophy/

Die Filmbiographie ist eines der ältesten und vielschichtigsten Filmgenres überhaupt. Von Abel Gances Napoleon über die US-Biopics der Dreißigerjahre bis zu Oliver Stones umstrittenen Präsidentenfilmen JFK und Nixon reicht der Fächer der bekannten Beispiele dieser Filmgattung, die immer wieder zu leidenschaftlichen Kontroversen über Geschichte und ihre Darstellung im Kino Anlass gab.
Mit "Rolle des Lebens" legt Henry McKean Taylor die erste umfassende Aufarbeitung des Genres aus theoretischer Sicht vor. Er behandelt die kulturhistorischen Hintergründe und gesellschaftlichen Implikationen der Filmbiographie und analysiert aus erzähltheoretischer Perspektive zahlreiche Beispiele, wobei er sich im Unterschied zu Studien aus dem angelsächsischen Raum nicht auf Filme des Hollywood-Kinos beschränkt, sondern auch europäische und sowjetische Werke berücksichtigt: Neue Deutsche Filme wie Jutta Brückners "Kolossale Liebe", Francesco Rosis "Mafia-Biographie", Lucky Luciano oder auch Sergej P aradshanows "Sajat Nowa".

The scope of this Conference is intended to represent a wide range of topics related to the study of logic and principles of narrative production, but also to “postclassical” narratology that goes beyond its structuralist background, focusing on the ways that narrative structures our perception of social and cultural phenomena and helps us construct meaning in general. We are interested in the contextuality of the modes of narrative representation, in its historicity, and in its pragmatic and artistic functions
across different media. What is relevant is the philosophy of action in the theory of narrative, in the narrative as communication, in cross-cultural narration, in cognitive theory of narrative acts, and the concept of performativity in narratology connected to the embodied ways of knowing.
A narrative explanation in science and knowledge transfer in education is
also examined, and in a whole range of other topics that transform narratological study into a plethora of different, often interdisciplinary, mixed-method research approaches.
Our special guest is a Dutch cultural theorist, critic, video artist and
filmmaker. Mieke Bal. Hence, the motto of our conference is taken from
Mieke Bal’s thesis on the use of narratology for cultural analysis where she
defines narrative as a cultural attitude, and narratology as a perspective
on culture. “What I propose we are best off with in the age of cultural studies is a conception of narratology that implicates text and reading, subject and object, production and analysis, in the act of understanding. In other words, I advocate a narrative theory that enables the differentiation of
the place of narrative in any cultural expression without privileging any
medium, mode, or use; that differentiates its relative importance and the
effect of the narrative (segments) on the remainder of the object as well
as on the reader, listener, viewer. A theory, that is, which defines and describes
narrativity, not narrative; not a genre or object but a cultural mode
of expression.” (Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative,
Second Edition, 1997: 222)
Topics to be discussed include:
Classical and Postclassical Narratology
Narrating Film: Narration and Reconstruction of Subjectivity
Performing Narrative in Contemporary Performance Practice and in Daily Life
Narrative Performance and Its Aesthetics
Beyond Mimetic Models: Unnatural Narratology
“Denarration” and Extreme Narration in Contemporary Drama and Fiction
Transmedial Storytelling
Narrative through Nonlinguistic Media
Narrative and Digital Media
Conversational Storytelling
Orality and Narration
Cyberspace Textuality
Narration and Memory
Documentary Storytelling and its (Un)Reliable Narrators
Narrating Violence and Trauma
Visual narratives; Narrative in contemporary visual practice
The Fine Art of Storytelling and Narration in the Fine Art
Cross-cultural Narration and Migrating Selves
Narrative and Embodied Knowing in Dance and Performance
Narrative and Ideology
Political Narratives
Cognitive Narratology: Narrative Thinking, Stories and Minds
Narration in Science – Narration or Science?

The conference “Narratology and Its Discontents:
Narrating beyond Narration” held at the Academy of Drama Art, University of Zagreb (6-8. April 2017) was realised as a part of the scientific project “How Practice-led Research in Artistic Performance Can Contribute to Croatian Science” (IP-2014-09-6963), supported by CroatianScience Foundation.

Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: 1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; 2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and 3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Offering a comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood cinema’s capacity to provide aesthetic pleasure, the book sets out to explain how Hollywood creates, for masses of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.

Qualcosa accomuna, dall’origine, geografia e cinema: l’intento di descrivere, di dare un senso al mondo rappresentandolo per immagini, di dargli forma, di archiviarlo, di renderlo visibile nella sua interezza, appropriabile in termini intellettuali, se non proprio materiali.
Il cinema contemporaneo mostra di considerare in modo più problematico questa propria “geograficità”. Sembra talvolta essersi accorto (o essersi convinto) che il proprio ruolo è cambiato, che non può più – forse non deve – guardare in un certo modo, e che come dispositivo ha dei limiti fondamentali: i limiti della propria logica, del proprio modo di pensare il mondo.

The objective of this paper is to show how the filmmaker’s genre of choice shapes the main discourse of the film. The author compares Helke Sander’s documentary Liberators Take Liberties (1991-1992) and Max Farberbock’s narrative feature A Woman in Berlin (2008) both dealing with the dramatic effect of the end of WWII, in particular with the instances of German women having been raped by the Allied troops, a theme first publicized in the anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin (1953). There is a clear connection between the book and the two films, but if Sander focuses on the rape itself and on the extraordinary female  experience of war, Farberbock is more concerned with cross-national revenge.

L’histoire de la narratologie est paradoxale. Sa naissance découle de la prise de conscience précoce que l’horizon des travaux portant sur la narrativité déborde
du cadre de la théorie littéraire. Pourtant, cette discipline émergente a longtemps été réticente à s’émanciper de son périmètre d’origine. Il en a découlé qu’un certain nombre de concepts se sont figés dans des définitions qui les rendent difficilement applicables à des formes non verbales. A une époque où les grands récits de notre culture se déclinent sur une vaste gamme de supports médiatiques, souvent coordonnés, au sein desquels les narrations bédéiques, filmiques, télévisuelles ou vidéoludiques occupent une place de plus en plus centrale, il est devenu urgent de développer une théorie du récit capable d’embrasser cette diversité. Mais cet élargissement ne doit pas se faire au mépris d’une conscience aiguë des contraintes que chaque support, par sa matérialité, mais aussi par sa tradition historique, impose au message narratif. Si l’on regarde au-delà du phénomène de l’adaptabilité des histoires, il devient alors essentiel de refonder des concepts transversaux suffisamment souples pour s’adapter à n’importe quel média, tout en réfléchissant à la manière spécifique dont chacun d’entre eux s’incarne médiatiquement.

From a historical context, this article intends to carry out a formal analysis of John
Ford’s work, with the purpose of identifying the origins of an anti-classic aesthetic, which
marks the director’s filmography from the end of the 1920’s to the end of the 1940’s, and
establish a mannerist period in the career of one of the greatest names in classical Hollywood
cinema.

These two works from the Spanish filmmaker introduce a group of offenders living in the outskirts of Madrid. The margin plays a central role in both films but their narratological mechanism is to a large extent different. In Los golfos (1959), Opera prima of the director, the city and margin spaces are symbolically represented on a horizontal axis, in a centripetal dynamic, from the periphery to the centre of which the bullring is synecdoche. In Deprisa, deprisa (1980), the overall narration moves from the centre towards the periphery and even beyond in a dynamic of dispersal. While the margin is omnipresent in this film, the centre only has a ghostly presence-absence

""What does God say, Father,  for suicide?" On the relationship between cinematic art and historiographical analysis in Eric Till's Luther (2003) 

This paper sketches Luther's view on suicide and the treatment of suicides in early modern central Europe. Recent scholarship's findings are then confronted with the fictional filmic staging of Joseph Fiennes alias Luther, burying an infantile suicide. An icon figure of a contemporary protestant culture of remembrance, Eric Till's Luther reveals enduring and persistent confessional stereotypes as well as polemics by overwhelming the audience with emotions and simplistic caricatures. Furthermore, the article highlights remarkable ambivalences of this film's reception among theologians, historians and history students."

This essay will discuss three important thinkers and creative artists that have made a significant contribution to my research topic in the field of filmdance, film theory and subjective camera technique. The three key people are Christian Metz (French film theorist), Sally Potter (British film maker and choreographer) and Maya Deren, (Russian/American film theorist, experimental film maker, dancer and poet). In my critical analyses of Metz, I will specifically look at his theories on the musings of Pablo Pasolini, an Italian filmmaker and critique of narrative cinematic language, and Metz’s critical dialogue with Pasolini’s theorem, im-segni.

Spiral as an Innovative Schema of Film Storytelling / This article deals with a specific pattern of audiovisual storytelling, where a character is stuck in an iterative segment of space, time and causality, is aware of that and tries to find a way to deal with it. It introduces the term "spiral narrative" for this narrative pattern known from films such as the 1993 Groundhog Day. It identifies it as an innovative schema which helps American film and television creators to defamiliarize various amounts of already established models of narrative development. The first part of this article defines the spiral narrative schema on the one side and the so-called loop narrative schema on the other side, explaining several aesthetic norms in films that exploit the spiral narrative schema. It also inquires into the possible ways in which spiral narratives can affect the viewers as well as the aesthetic sources of the spiral narrative schema as such. The second part brings a much more specific explanation using reasonably detailed analyzes of three films (the short 12:01 PM shot in 1990, the television film 12:01 from 1993, and the already mentioned Groundhog Day). These three analyzes reveal a historical trajectory, which might functionally explain the process of the establishment of the spiral narrative as an innovative auxiliary pattern in popular American audiovision.