Musings 1: The Emptiness of Story.

[Capo]

I've been writing a lot of extra-curricular stuff lately, seriously neglecting what I need to be doing for my course in favour of my own ponderings and preoccupations.

I thought that, every so often, if what I write might be of specific interest to our board, I would post it in this section for your reading pleasure and perhaps further discussion or feedback. The blue text preceding each one gives a context as to why I wrote it.

Almost nine weeks into my degree as a Literature and Film Studies student, I have become heavily frustrated, often angered, by the restricted minds of my fellow peers. Their philosophies are mere naive regurgitations of what information has been passed onto them. I find that Film Studies as an academic discipline, whether due to Cinema's very young age or the youth of Film Studies itself, attracts wannabes and hangers-on. I feel as if I come across as not only somebody who dislikes Film, but also very narrow-minded. It is, I hope you will realise, quite the opposite. My dislike of many of the films we are shown, I tell people, stems from my having seen a lot more than most.

Last week in a seminar on Ideology in Cinema a fellow student said, rather passively (as if it was the norm), that Cinema was a medium of storytelling, and that she wanted to make films which told a good story. I struck up an argument, and received a collective gasp from all others for my efforts. I find that whenever I have such debates on specific topics, that it leaks into my general everyday conversations, that I exhaust myself by seeking other opinion, half-aware that they are not really interested, and disagree. It's a kind of masochistic streak which I can't get rid of. It's a kind of unconscious mission of finding people are worth the effort.

And tonight I wrote this, a self-justification of my beliefs.

---

“I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being - all stories have become obsolete and clichéd, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time.”

-Béla Tarr

What is a story? A story is a succession of events connected by consistency in character; by the evolving relationships between characters to other characters; between characters and their environments. Suppose I was to tell you a story.

A man walked into a gas station. That is a story. A man walked into a gas station, said hello to the attendant, filled his car and paid for it. That is a different story, or it can be an extension of the same story. Has it become more complex? No, decidedly not; merely longer. Let’s make it more complex. A man walked into a gas station, said hello to the attendant, filled his car and paid for it; but while he did these daily things, a bomb was put under his car. We have another strand now, another character, another universe inhabiting the original environment.

But has it really become more complex? Is it not merely another story which fits into this larger story because it strikes up a relationship with another story still? Is not a story a connection of smaller stories, which are in fact merely events, situations, with conclusions in and of themselves, connected to other conclusive events and situations in and of themselves because the storyteller wishes to do that, wishes to carry on, not by expanding but by extending?

No, it isn’t more complex. Perhaps more interesting, depending on taste, but not more complex. It might be more complex, however, to question the significance of this bomb, the reason why it has been introduced, the purpose behind it. Whether or not the storyteller wishes to dwell on the bomb as a narrative drive or as the window to another character is what the level of complexity – or indeed the existence of complexity – depends on.

Complexity is psychology. Complexity is a state of being, of existence, of purpose and significance in that being and existence. Complexity is a perpetual, unresolved cycle of thought. The story is an easily resolved (even if it might often appear to remain ‘unresolved’), conclusive slice of the perpetuality in which it exists. The story is merely a convenient vehicle on which to carry such complexity, a) because storytellers, like the stories they tell, are not original, and b) stories are lazy pastimes for people who wish to be told one – they are for people with too much time on their hands. A story has already been told; storytelling has been exhausted of possibilities. Originality is invested in the complexity, the substance, the psychology, which in turn stems from a number of things: form mainly, for that is the first surface which is pierced by an audience, texture, tone, pattern, rhythm, the cadence of a work. But not the story.

From stories we learn nothing, about the world, about nature, about the science of things, and most importantly about ourselves or our relation to other selves. We might learn things, by digging beneath the emptiness of the story, by fabricating our own meaning, by reading between the lines. And so in a sense we are not as lazy as we first thought…

But we are, but we are: we fabricate because of the inadequacy, the empty abyss created by a story, but we cling to and rely on the story in the first place to open windows, to create ventures and opportunities for thought. In fact, a story does not even create emptiness; for it creates or adds nothing. If anything, it fills an emptiness, a void which we’d rather ignore; because in emptiness there is too much room for complexity, for substance, too much room and time for progression, and we prefer to tell and be told stories because they are able to control complexity, because they pass the time without our knowing it.

Because complexity is the inevitability of Time.

[RNL]

Would you tend to use the words 'narrative' and 'story' interchangably?

[Capo]

I'm really not quite sure, something else I've certainly been considering, though.

Because to me a story is what is being told, but the narrative is the way in which it is told. Plot and story are interchangeable, I think; plot is what happens, but narrative is what is shown.

I'm never really interested in what happens, or in the illusion of what happens. I hate listening to long jokes or seemingly irrelevant, filler stories in everyday conversation. But the way in which what happens - or the illusion of what has happened or is happening - is revealed, the way in which is narratively evoked, is very, very interesting to me.

I'd like to see The Aristocrats, a film about a crude joke told over and over by different people, to perhaps put my theory to the test: if the joke is unfunny (which I've heard it is), can it be made funny?

[RNL]

admin said:

Because to me a story is what is being told, but the narrative is the way in which it is told.

That's how I feel.

Narrative is plastic, story isn't. Narrative forms, or embodies, story.

When you watch a film, a story has been communicated to you via a particular narrative. When you synopsise the film's story in your Proview, you're communicating the same story via a very different narrative.

I think there are three 'layers' to any fiction. The created world, the inhabited world, and the narrative tissue that binds them.

Plot and story are interchangeable, I think; plot is what happens, but narrative is what is shown.

'Plot' is a vague word to me, it seems to refer to the laying out of things. I'm not sure. I wouldn't use it as a synonym for 'story'.

I'm never really interested in what happens, or in the illusion of what happens. I hate listening to long jokes or seemingly irrelevant, filler stories in everyday conversation. But the way in which what happens or the illusion of what has happened or is happening is revealed, the way in which is narratively evoked, is very, very interesting to me.

Me too. I'm still very interested in what happens, though. Are you saying the subject matter of a film is unimportant so long as it's narratively inventive?

Ideally, for me, a film would be thematically, sensually and narratively interesting. That's the whole package.

I'd like to see The Aristocrats, a film about a crude joke told over and over by different people, to perhaps put my theory to the test: if the joke is unfunny (which I've heard it is), can it be made funny?

I taped that the other night. I've seen Trey Parker and Matt Stone delivering the joke via Kyle and Cartman, and it's hilarious. That's a bit different than a comedian delivering it directly, though, without the framing of an established fiction.

[Capo]

I don't think a story has a theme, that is why it is empty. You could tell the same story twice and explore different themes.

I think the narrative injects theme into it, and that's where my interest is formed; the narrative form decides whether my interest is held and sustained or not.

I'm interested in what happens, but only if the narrative has grabbed my attention in the first place to make me care. My favourite novel is The Magus, but whenever somebody asks me what it is about I can't, and don't want, to tell them, not without being verbose and revealing. The same with The Prestige. Synopses unpack the fictional narrative and wrap the story into something else, something which detracts and deflates. When people ask me what they're about, I'd rather go into the themes they explore, because to me that's what is so interesting.

The subject matter often attracts me to a text in the first place, so no, I definitely wouldn't discard it. But if a subject matter covers themes of interest to me personally, the likelihood is that it has been covered previously by somebody else or in a different text, which is why I'm interested in it, which is why I like it so. So after that point of initial interest, it is all to do with the new angle in which it is tackled, the new way in which it is evoked, the new light in which it can be shed, to further me to my truths.

It doesn't mean I demand absolute originality from narrative invention, or place an emphasis on stuff like non-linear storytelling, though. But a lot of films that I regard absolutely missable could have been absolute masterpieces, had they been told by somebody else or in a different way.

[RNL]

Yeah, I'm pretty much in total agreement with you.

I don't think a story has a theme, that is why it is empty. You could tell the same story twice and explore different themes.

This is an interesting notion.

What's the purest, least obtrusive narrative? Is it the matter-of-fact language of reportage (the language of your Proview synopses)?

I've just taken the sub-headline from one of the news stories on the BBC RSS feed I have on my browser.

A woman left infertile after cancer treatment is making a final appeal for a court to allow her to use frozen embryos fertilised by a former partner.

If that's our story, could you reform it so that it doesn't explore themes of authority, ethics, gender, procreation, disease, medicine, science, etc?

Are certain themes not inherent to a story?

[Capo]

If that's our story, could you reform it so that it doesn't explore themes of authority, ethics, gender, procreation, disease, medicine, science, etc?

Try italicising the "explore" instead of the "doesn't". Because exploring is taking or finding a possible route, and journeying down it; everything else is merely coverage, junctions you come to and decide to pass, in favour of the route you're taking.

News snippets which fill a quarter of a column to say suchandsuch was locked up yesterday might be coverage, but a main article going over two or three pages might explore.

And yes, I think you could change the emphasis of exploration in that story. It might be one of the most rewarding processes of transformation ever, too, and, I imagine, give birth to something rather uite original.

[RNL]

Okay, fair point.

Consider a more detailed story then. Take Paul Haggis's Crash. Could you take that story and remove the theme of race relations from it? Take Cronenberg's Crash, could you remove the theme of polymorphous perversity? You could maybe try to twist them in another direction, force them toward other themes, but these two themes are the fundamental fabrics of these two stories, they're the reasons the stories play out at all.

[Capo]

Are either of them primarily stories, though?

See, I'd consider them explorations more than stories. The story is merely there to make the exploration more accessible. It is a window, a vehicle, if you like. I'm pretty sure Cronenberg, or Ballad, originally planned to explore 'polymorphous perversity' before writing or making a story, and they found that a story was the best way to sell the theme.

What's the story of Cronenberg's Crash? Even Haggis'? I'd consider them both a series of events. There's no real describable story to either.

[RNL]

admin said:

Are either of them primarily stories, though?

Are either of the films primarily stories? No, I don't think so.

But they do present stories, and I think the stories themselves carry those themes.

See, I'd consider them explorations more than stories. The story is merely there to make the exploration more accessible. It is a window, a vehicle, if you like. I'm pretty sure Cronenberg, or Ballad, originally planned to explore 'polymorphous perversity' before writing or making a story, and they found that a story was the best way to sell the theme.

The film is an exploration of that particular theme, but the film also presents a story, and that story, I would think, inherently carries the theme the film addresses. You can take the story out of the film and synopsise it and those themes will remain. Forget the film is a film and imagine yourself entering the fictional world it presents, imagine yourself watching the events of the story unfold in their reality. You've gone beyond the level of the creative artist exploring a theme, but that theme is still there in front of you. I think the story inherently carries them. If the artist wants to explore a particular theme, then the story they choose is likely chosen because it carries that theme.

Moreover, what kind of artist first decides on a theme? Maybe some do, but I just can't conceive of it. Surely ideas come first, and if they fit together then a thematic fabric inevitably emerges. If the artist repetitively plumbs a lot of the same ideas, then they continually explore the same themes.

What's the story of Cronenberg's Crash? Even Haggis'? I'd consider them both a series of events. There's no real describable story to either.

What is a story but a series of events that lead into oneanother (or a "slice of life")? In Cronenberg's film, James Ballard is in a head-on collision with Helen Remington, after which and partly because of which Remington, Ballard and his wife Catherine become involved with a subculture of car fetishists, they meet Vaughan, they stage re-enactments of celebrity motor-deaths, one by one they all fuck eachother, etc.

[Capo]

So that last paragraph didn't mention any themes. So it was a description of the story. A story of the story, right? So a story about a group of people who "fuck each other" whilst re-enacting famous car crashes came to the imagination first? Or was it a thematic conception which found a noteworthy, accessible vehicle in some kind of cohesive story? Or am I being finicky and naive in deconstructing the process of conception, and do the two, form and content, always co-exist from the start, or do they merge together upon physical fruition?

What thematic fabric is invested into a story might not be what emerges from it. I'm going out on one here, I know, but suppose I took Crash to be a story about romance. Or overlooked the racial hatred in Haggis' film. Suppose a small child watched Irréversible and then, when asked to describe it, said the opening scene in the Rectum was about men dancing, and that the rape scene was a wrestling match and the man wins.

What kind of meaning we extract from a film is important - and clearly intended, in most cases. But if you were to describe Cronenberg's Crash in an unobtrusive way, I might imagine it rather differently.

[Capo]

Been thinking about this; I still have problems with calling Cronenberg's Crash a story.

To me, it is a narrative of ideas, of themes, a repeated succession of events, with no resolution and no discernible starting point; it's a mass, with no reason to begin, no reason to end, and what happens in the middle is an expansion, an exploration, which by the end may or may not have proved satisfactory. I think you'll agree that Cronenberg isn't primarily interested in telling a story. But I'm not saying that's why it isn't one. You're right, I think, in saying that it 'presents' a story.

But a story can be found in anything.

We as an audience negotiate a story out of Crash, because it is convenient to do so. Just as we might negotiate a story from a painting. But whereas a painting offers much room for imagination, to imagine what lies beyond the canvas, with Cinema it is even more absurd because the negotiation does not construct, but rejects.

Connecting images to images, scenes to scenes is an assumption on our part that they inhabit the same world, are part of the same universe. It's as convenient as us as it is for the filmmaker, to assume we're being told a story.

[RNL]

admin said:

So that last paragraph didn't mention any themes. So it was a description of the story. A story of the story, right? So a story about a group of people who "fuck each other" whilst re-enacting famous car crashes came to the imagination first? Or was it a thematic conception which found a noteworthy, accessible vehicle in some kind of cohesive story? Or am I being finicky and naive in deconstructing the process of conception, and do the two, form and content, always co-exist from the start, or do they merge together upon physical fruition?

In the senses that we're using the terms, it's not a story of a story, it's a narrative. The story is what has taken place in the fictional universe, and the infinity of narratives that can be used to present that story are malleable, but the story itself is unchanging and concrete. The story, you might say, is the facts of the fiction.

Think of the difference between a documentary film and a fiction film. In a documentary, there's an actual event that has really occurred. If you take away the narrative (the film), the event, and therefore the potential story, still exist. In order for the event or series of events to become a story it has to be granted a narrative, whether that be in the form of a verbal anecdote or a documentary film. In the case of a fiction film, that world doesn't exist beyond the frame. If you take away the narrative (the film), you've destroyed the only window to that world and the world no longer exists outside of memory and imagination.

Ballard had particular philosophical concerns around the time he wrote Crash. There's a whole section in his previous novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, about the sexual potential of car crashes, and even a character named Vaughan. Ballard held a public exhibition of crashed cars shortly after publishing The Atrocity Exhibition, and Crash is really an elaboration on those ideas. He doesn't first think to write a novel on the theme of the potential sexuality of car crashes and then begin philosophising and connecting ideas and building his fictional world. The themes are just made manifest through the creative process. They just come out in the wash. If the artwork is coherent, it carries themes coherently. I know there are some authors who do choose their themes first, trying to write the "Great American Novel" or whatever, Billy and the Clonosaurus. I can't fathom that approach at all, choosing themes of "high seriousness" simply because they're stereotyped as such.

Though the notion of "form and content" is preferrable to the nonsense, poisonous notion of "style and substance", I have trouble ascertaining exactly what constitutes "content"? Is it simply meaning? Systems of meaning? If a film presents nothing but abstract images, it would likely be considered a formalist exercise with no content, since it carries no meanings. A film consisting of a single shot of a tree carries every denotative and connotative meaning that the word "tree" and the image of a tree carry. That's scant "content", though, right? It's nothing we can't get from just thinking about a tree; the film itself is extraneous, it's one-dimensional, it doesn't take us anywhere. So in order to create worthwhile meanings, a journey worth taking, it would seem that the images must make sense in succession, they must build something, some greater network of meanings. Now, forgetting the conservative populist notions of "content" as synonymous with figurative notions of "substance", any kinds of systems of compound meaning, even basic iconic meanings, constitute "content" - but what of the form? Examples of form and content as one? Allegorical camera movements? The most commonplace of which is the "first-person" camera. Hitchcock's acrophobic camera in Vertigo, Bertolucci's dancing camera in Last Tango, Noé's time-travelling camera in Irréversible, and 90% of the camerawork in De Palma's Snake Eyes. How far can that be taken? Should it even be a concern, or does it defer too readily to literary ideas? Hmm...

What thematic fabric is invested into a story might not be what emerges from it. I'm going out on one here, I know, but suppose I took Crash to be a story about romance. Or overlooked the racial hatred in Haggis' film. Suppose a small child watched Irréversible and then, when asked to describe it, said the opening scene in the Rectum was about men dancing, and that the rape scene was a wrestling match and the man wins.

Well, I think the child would be wrong. There's no doubt about what the story in Irréversible is.

Take this example of the difference between narrative and story. Many narratives are completely linear, but, I'd wager, most aren't. Most are almost completely linear, but flashbacks are a common narrative delineation device. Almost all stories are linear. Time-travel stories, for instance, are often non-linear (though their narratives may well be linear).

What kind of meaning we extract from a film is important - and clearly intended, in most cases. But if you were to describe Cronenberg's Crash in an unobtrusive way, I might imagine it rather differently.

We're left in no doubt as to what the series of events that takes place in that world involves. No amount of rewording will change what happens. If there's ambiguity, gaps in the story, then that's all it is, we're still expected to accept that something occurred, something that connects the moments of certainty. Cinema is a very concrete medium, sight is our primary sense; we believe what we see.

Been thinking about this; I still have problems with calling Cronenberg's Crash a story.

I'm not calling it a story, all I'm saying is that it presents/contains a story; and I'm saying that that story carries the theme of polymorphous perversity, or, to be less specific, aberrant sexuality, and does so inherently.

To me, it is a narrative of ideas, of themes, a repeated succession of events, with no resolution and no discernible starting point; it's a mass, with no reason to begin, no reason to end, and what happens in the middle is an expansion, an exploration, which by the end may or may not have proved satisfactory. I think you'll agree that Cronenberg isn't primarily interested in telling a story. But I'm not saying that's why it isn't one. You're right, I think, in saying that it 'presents' a story.

That stories must have resolutions and characters must have motivations is just a matter of convention.

I do agree that Cronenberg--and indeed Ballard--is most interested in the exploration of ideas, but all his films present stories in service of those ideas.

I'm trying to define my understanding of "story" here: Storytelling is the fictionalization of events.

Let's say that you're witness to some interesting conversational exchange in a restaurant, that's the event. Then say you think to recreate that event in a film, you have to fictionalise it, you have to give it a narrative, and you thereby turn that event into a story. All stories are fictitious. "Real life story" is an oxymoron. One's autobiography is the fictionalisation of one's own life. The events recounted weren't stories when they were lived, nor were they stories to those who were third-party witness to them, but they're stories when they're "narrativised".

Think of it in terms of "layers". Let's say the artist fabricates an imaginary world, not unlike the world the reader of a novel fabricates - sketchy, very fragile and easily impressionable, plastic; all it takes is a word of two from the writer and the vague shape we've imposed on the imaginary room the imaginary character is inhabiting can be totally altered, usually without much confusion to the reader; very fluid mental images. He mentions a lamp, so suddenly there's a lamp, we add a lamp, or he mentions the sloping ceiling, so the ceiling slopes, we alter the architecture, etc. Okay, so the artist fabricates an imaginary world, and fabricates characters who inhabit that world as we inhabit ours. To the characters, and, if we choose to consider it, to every other imaginary person inhabiting that imaginary world, the events that we are presented with seem like events, because they're "real", they're not "narrativised". Now pull back through one layer of "reality" into our world and those imaginary "people" become characters and those imaginary events become a story or stories or story threads converging into "a" story under the will of the artist and the shape of his narrative attention.

But a story can be found in anything.

Well... you might struggle finding a story in this image. Yes, you could spin one by importing all sorts of additional information and ideas, but there's not much that can happen within that image, even if it were moving.

We as an audience negotiate a story out of Crash, because it is convenient to do so. Just as we might negotiate a story from a painting. But whereas a painting offers much room for imagination, to imagine what lies beyond the canvas, with Cinema it is even more absurd because the negotiation does not construct, but rejects.

A painted image doesn't exist within time, it's non-narrative. You can spin your own story based on the image, but a painting doesn't present a story.

To say that a film presents "a" story is disputable, as you could argue that there are as many stories as there are characters. You could say that the convergance of the many story threads a film presents constitutes "the" story.

Connecting images to images, scenes to scenes is an assumption on our part that they inhabit the same world, are part of the same universe. It's as convenient as us as it is for the filmmaker, to assume we're being told a story.

Yeah, and you could say the same thing about a novel. We assume that each time a character's name pops up he's identical to the last guy who bore that name. When someone verbally tells us a story, we assume the same sort of connection between various notes of key information (as we do between actors' faces and certain items and environments in cinema).

...

I've just read back over all that and it seems to bounce all over the place, but hopefully I've hit on something somewhere in there.

[Capo]

Apologies for the delay.

wetdog said:

I've just read back over all that and it seems to bounce all over the place, but hopefully I've hit on something somewhere in there.

You did, you did.

You must realise that I have been simply playing with theories here, in such musings, in such ponderings, in such meandering doubts.

This is a discussion of deep resonance for me, and for now, you have justified your convictions, and I agree with them.

Connecting images to images, scenes to scenes is an assumption on our part that they inhabit the same world, are part of the same universe. It's as convenient as us as it is for the filmmaker, to assume we're being told a story.

Would you agree with that, then? Not sure if you do. And whether you do or not, do you think it is more reasonable to fabricate a story from a novel than it is to from a film? How might we be able to suggest that a story is more literary than it is filmic without resorting to mere tradition?

[Capo]

Funnily enough, I can see Crash on the big screen on Tuesday...

[RNL]

admin said:

Connecting images to images, scenes to scenes is an assumption on our part that they inhabit the same world, are part of the same universe. It's as convenient as us as it is for the filmmaker, to assume we're being told a story.

Would you agree with that, then? Not sure if you do. And whether you do or not, do you think it is more reasonable to fabricate a story from a novel than it is to from a film? How might we be able to suggest that a story is more literary than it is filmic without resorting to mere tradition?

Yeah, I agree with that, but I don't see it as any more arbitrary or assumptive than making connections between characters' names in a novel, or even between people's faces in real life.

It's obviously a perfectly natural thing to do, since we don't need to be taught how to comprehend a sequence of images, we just intuitively understand them in the same way that we do the real images that surround us. Yeah, image sequences can still be confusing, but so can ambiguous prose. There's a film noir called Lady in the Lake that was shot entirely in the first-person; I haven't seen it, but I've read that its elegant pans and tilts inadvertantly emphasise the fact that that's not how we really see. Our eyes move in "saccades", dozens of fixed perspectives in each second that blend together into a fluid, moving world, so it would seem that cinematic montage is, cognitively, a simple extension of that, albeit one that brings with it a far greater potential for tempero-spatial removal; so we can flick our eyes around the room, but in a movie theatre we can (or must, since we're sitting in the dark and there's nothing else to see) flick our eyes around a huge image while the film flicks its camera-eye around an entire world of the filmmaker's imagining.

I don't think a story can be more inherently suited to the novelistic narrative or the cinematic narrative. At least I can't think of any offhand.

I do, however, agree with Peter Greenaway when he says, "It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extraordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs."

Popular literature and popular cinema are as unadventurous as eachother, and each is heavily dependent upon the other. Something like 60% of all Hollywood productions are still based on novels (with the rest based on previous films), and one of the most important questions asked of any new novel in the mainstream publishing industry is how likely it is to catch Hollywood's attention, because nobody there gets a bigger payday than they do when they option the movie rights. The "bestseller" chart is little more than a proving ground. Hollywood execs keep their eyes on the most popular novels, pay for the rights, then hire screenwriters to distill the essential story into a theatrical-cinematic form, then hire 'name' actors, stage the expensive theatrical performance and capture it on camera for mass dissemination.

The phrase "the book was better" is certainly annoying, but unfortunately it's also generally true, because in almost every case of a book-to-film adaptation, neither the book nor the film concerned themselves with anything other than telling the story, the narratives are always basic, "invisible", perfunctory - and the book simply told a more detailed and lengthy story.

I think it's important to note that storytelling is an oral artform, not a literary one. It predates literature of any kind by hundreds of thousands of years, so it's not as though literature has any greater claim to being a storytelling medium than cinema does. Yes, it uses words, so I suppose that would stand to its argument, but any story that would've been told around a fire a hundred thousand years ago would still have had to have been experienced as sight and sound before being symbolised by words, so you could say cinema short-circuits the novel, nullifies it, makes directly actual its approximate virtual. Even when people began fabricating mythologies, inventing fiction (whether they knew they were or not), any and all stories they would tell would be formed based on things that they'd seen and heard in their daily lives - experience informs imagination. Cinema cuts right through to that: "Whatever appears in the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it."

To keep to the same examples, I mentioned in the Cronenberg thread that there's a certain scene in Crash in which Vaughan recites verbatim a passage from The Atrocity Exhibition about the car crash "mediating the sexuality of those who've died with an intensity impossible in any other form." It's that Ballardian prose that sounds so fantastic when read but so clunky when spoken. Jonathan Weiss's fascinatingly problematic adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition suffers throughout from the same issue. Literary storytelling is not just a direct extension of the oral traditions, a writing down of the spoken words. It's its own thing altogether, with its own peculiar narrative conventions, devices and possibilities. Sometimes you read a joke and find it hilarious, then you try reading that joke aloud following the text exactly, but all the humour is sapped out of it. They're almost totally different narrative forms.

[RNL]

admin said:

Funnily enough, I can see Crash on the big screen on Tuesday...

It gets better with repeat viewings.

It's always referred to as a "cold, clinical" movie, as are almost all of Cronenberg's. I disagreed that he was a cold filmmaker, but it took me at least three viewings to find the emotional centre of Crash - it's extremely emotionally remote and elusive, but it definitely has a soul, alien though it may be. I found the cumulative effect of the film devastating the last time I watched it.

Suschitzky and Shore both did some of their best work ever on it.

[svsg]

I reached this thread from another one, but there are so many interesting points here that I have to discuss before I return to that one. I spent a couple of hours with a lot interruptions reading this one, thanks capo for the link.

I have only seen Crash(which I didn't like much) from last year, which was about racism and not the one you guys are talking about. So I will use other examples to illustrate my point.


What is Story?:

Let me take the example of 'Apocalypse Now Redux', my all-time favorite movie and reduce it (crudely) to its constituents, to see where 'story' fits in:

Story: Captain Willard is sent to Cambodia to kill a renegade colonel, Kurtz. He goes on a boat journey with four men. The events in their journey affects/transforms them profoundly.

I find this moderately interesting. If this synopsis were told to me by a friend, I would go and watch the movie. But this is not what the movie is about. The story is just a 'carrier' to convey something else. What is that? I'll come to it shortly.

Plot: The crew encounter an eccentric Colonel, Kilgore who takes them to the beginning of their journey. At Do-Lung, they watch the Playboy bunny show. They encounter the french men at the plantation. Mr Clean gets shot in the gunfire. etc. etc.

The main details. Some of them interesting, some just functional.

Minor/Finer Plot details: The French men are having dinner, they drink champagne, etc. etc.

The above two form the skeleton of the film structure, the details that will carry the message across. Again the key word is 'carry'. carry what?

Dialogue: self evident. It is again a tool.

Theme/Message: Duality of war, good vs evil, primordial human instincts, hypocrisy in modern warfare, traveling back in time etc. etc.

This is what the film is all about. Vietnam is incidental, Kurtz is incidental, Willard is incidental and so are the Frenchmen, boat and bunnies. How does the script (I am using this term since we are analyzing the film according to its literary structure, as opposed to the cinematic structure, which is images+sound+editing) convey the theme across, from the mind of the director to the viewer? It needs the story, plot and dialogue as its carriers. The theme is the most interesting aspect for me in the film as far as the literary abstraction goes.

I already mentioned about the cinematic medium-specific abstraction (images+sound+editing). I find it convenient to switch back and forth between the two abstractions to analyze a film.




Can a story be told without a theme?

Yes, I am sure I can make up one. But it would be terribly boring and I am not willing to 'see' it in a film or 'read' it in a novel or whatever.



Is novel a medium more suited to telling stories than film?

I don't think so. Cinema is images, sound and time. It can tell a story easily (requiring less brains) than a novel. Can it explore, and in turn make you explore a 'theme' better than a novel? I don't have an answer for this.

[Capo]

A story is always told in the absence of all other stories.
The beginning of a story is always the middle all other stories.
The middle of the story is always the beginning of all other untold stories.

A story is a sequence of events. It unfolds through linear causality; in short, cause-and-effect.

A narrative shapes this linear causality into an extractable (understandable) structure.

The structure of narrative has two times: the narrative time and the story time.

Narrative time happens in real-time, measured by clocks. Story time happens in illusory time, measured by action of events. Narrative time can last only as the narrative does. Story time is inherently longer.

Narrative time therefore compacts story time, it compresses it down into extractable, understandable ends, by practical storytelling means.

Since narratives embody stories, all narratives take place after the event. (The event is that from which the story is formed, from which it borrows.) Stories can only be told in the present tense through a forged narrative, through forged time; by 'forging' I mean illusion.

A novel written in present tense has been translated from the past tense in which it first arrived to the writer. Ideas present themselves as having already happened.

The closest narrative can embody both real-time and story-time is live broadcasting; the closest after that is stream of consciousness writing.

The camera, because its gaze is a perpetual truth, as opposed to the selective truth of the pen, is a more immediate narrative device than the writer. A writer attempting to chronicle their entire existence in words is less immediate - though not necessarily less effective - than a camera recording them trying to do so.

Narrative can do nothing but move forward. Irréversible's narrative moves forward, its story moves forward, though its plot - its sequencing of events - unfolds backwards.

Plot is the structuring of events in order to inform a more effective narrative.

The flashback is a non-linear plot-device. It is used to inform present events. By 'present events' I mean those which are happening in narrative time; they have of course already happened.

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At what point does something become a story? When it is written or when it is read? When it is told or when it is heard?

Is storytelling a construction of meaning, by the storyteller, or a deconstruction of meaning, by the audience?

Is telling the story dependent on someone willing to extract it?

If there is a difference between narrator and narratee (and there is, for obvious reasons), what are the responsibilities of each? Does one have more responsibility than the other?

Is narrative a lie?

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I think there are three 'layers' to any fiction. The created world, the inhabited world, and the narrative tissue that binds them.

What is meant by this? Could you give an example and say what each of those would be in that example, please?

[RNL]

admin said:

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I think there are three 'layers' to any fiction. The created world, the inhabited world, and the narrative tissue that binds them.

What is meant by this? Could you give an example and say what each of those would be in that example, please?

The inhabited world is our (the audience's) reality. The 'real world'.

The created world is the fictional 'reality' that the characters inhabit.

The narrative 'tissue' that binds them is the film/novel/play, etc.