Yet to be realised - BRIEF

This brief also relates  to theme of “narrative” and will be included in this blog also.

The “Yet to be Realised” brief is a collective student project, in which each student receives an image, unpicks and interprets it, creates there response and passes their image only on to the next person, who, not having seeing the image sent the person previous has to interpret the reading of the image created by the person before them.

We were all provided with a list which was a ready organised order, i presume done at random. Each person has a date which they will receive an image. And the vast majority of us have 24 hours only to respond to this and pass our image to the next person. The image can be a found image or one we have taken. until i receive my image i don't know what i will be doing as i am yet to discover the appropriate approach to continue the story.

Initial proposal - circular narrative brief

Elizabeth Chandler - BA(HONS) Photography - Level 5

Areas of Photographic Practice A - Circular Narrative

Project Proposal (Deadline  Tuesday 30th October 2012 - 1:30pm HT013)

I am highly enthused by this brief and have many ideas as to how I can develop my series of images. Each idea been extremely diverse and interpreting my initial given image in a different manner.

I have narrowed these ideas down to a few which I feel are strongest and wish to discuss here, in my initial proposal. 

After discussion with tutors and fellow peers, in addition to extensive research I hope to pin point the one strongest concept which I can then further develop and take forward to create my final submission.

The ideas stimulated from unpicking the image given to me relate to visible change In this instance, my first idea would be to look at alterations caused by the weathering of the environment in which we live. In the image we see a large arrow on what we could assume is a city, certainly a street scene. 

I propose to explore the deterioration of such street markings over time and present this in a series of images, returning back to the original state. This would replicate the life cycle of such markings and represent the constant maintenance required in order to ensure roads are safe and well illustrated.

To do this, I would find a location that matched (as closely as possible) to the one in the original image and take a series of images. I would then use photoshop to digitally weather the appearance of the road signs.

I could consider capturing peoples feet and cars in the images, to highlight the point that it is through constant use of the space that the scene is altered over time. I could even consider, If possible to attempt to create a scene towards the end of my series which shows the original state being restored.

In relation to the above discussed idea, I thought about looking at the visible change of a scene over time and how this is altered by the interaction of people using that space. For example the build up of rubbish throughout the day, again returning back to it’s original state after the road sweepers have done their work.

This series would be working with a 24 hour cycle which works perfectly in terms of the structure of a circular narrative. Again in order to create this I would look for a scene as close, aesthetically to the one in the image given to me and shoot as a typology at different intervals throughout the 24 hours.

Another idea I had was to consider focusing on the people that interact with the space and the significance of their presence. So for example, in the day commuters and workers. Versus the night time, the club scene and so on. I would have to consider the framing of the images. as to reveal relevant details which help identify the change of people using the space. I.e Shoes, briefcases, shopping bags ect. 

A final idea I had was to think of the image as being the start and end point of a 360 degree pan of the area, Although I like the idea of how this has potential to look, I am not sure it would flow as well as my other ideas. 

Considering the general theme of my initial ideas, my first thought for a title was “Visible Change” this is something that may or may not be appropriate depending which idea I choose to peruse, however it will be useful and serve it’s purpose as a working title upon which to develop my ideas.

With the first three ideas, I would be working to achieve a series of images which in a sense sits as a chronological time line displaying the progression of a given theme throughout a specified period of time.

I would be exploring the ‘visible changes’ that occur in that space and inspecting, through research the implications of these changes and how we as humans utilizing the space could be seen to be responsible for such. With any of the above stated ideas the work would be aimed at an art gallery setting, with people interested in such being the target audience. 

Thinking about the message of the images. It would depend on the idea i decide to peruse, however i think with my three main ideas, the work would be commenting on the interaction between people and places. Or the weather and it’s effect, in conjunction with the people using the spaces.

I will be certain with the assignment to pay attention to the flow of the images ensuring the colouration, viewpoint, format, angles, lighting and mood all flow in a sensible manner where appropriate. Doing so, I hope will guarantee the overall effect of the series. 

Circular narrative - BRIEF

This is a project in which we have to create a narrative series both begins and ends with the same image, each student has been randomly provided with an image which will form the beginning and end of our circular narrative piece.
We must produce a minimum of 5 images, that flow together as a set in a cohesive manner, telling a story. Together they will generate a meaning, that will must be easily understood by the audience.
Below is the photo I was was randomly given.

I have many ideas to begin with, i plan to wittle this down to no more than 4 which i will type up in my initial proposal and present in class in order to generate some notion of what idea appears strongest.

"If your pictures aren't good enough you're not close enough." (Robert Cappa)

"If your pictures aren't good enough you're not reading enough." (Tod Papageorge)

These quotes and the adaption from the original highlights the importance of understanding the context of your work and the work that informs it.

Andrew Zuckerman/Flower

I was mesmerised watching these videos which would appear to use stills captured in a typology like manner then all synchronised together and combined with powerful audio to illustrate the remarkable lifespan of flowers.

(http://www.andrewzuckerman.com/)

ED MALITSKY - Videos

(http://www.edmalitskyphotography.com/#mi=1&pt=0&pi=9&p=-1&a=0&at=0)

I found a video on this photographers site, although i went on interested looking at the images i became intrigued in the videos as they were made up of a series of stills and accompanied by audio.
In many ways the format and presentation of the video reminded me of La Jeete.

nice quote - Le Dœuff (1991)

 

“There is no thinking which does not wander, and any serious work should have etc. in its title and honestly state that it will not stick to the topic” Le Dœuff (1991)

 

Narrative and codes - Research

Narrative
1. That part of a deed or document which narrates the essential or relevant facts
2. An anccount or narration; a tale, recital (of facts etc.) 1566.

We can distinguish between linear and non-linear narrative.

• Linear narrative:

Is built on traditional notions of linearity and univocity, has a beginning, middle and end and is usually logically sequential in nature.
Example: Instructive texts, modernist films, most 19th and early 20C literature, childrens stories, court-room transcripts, computer programming etc.

• Non-linear narrative:

Contains elements such as : interruption, circular and unfinished references, chronological anarchy.
Examples: "Natural-born Killers" a film directed by Oliver Stone or "Santas Sangre" directed by Alejandro Jodorowski, many adverts seen on TV, writings such as "Finnegans wake", Hypertext* on the Internet.
 

In this lecture we are going to explore the dynamics and strategies involved in creating a narrative structure for still and time-based visual material.
We will also explore the use visual narrative structures and strategies in reference to photography in books and exhibitions.

Take a single photograph - any photograph - and you have narrative. Why?

Because you have signification (the fact or property of being significant or expressive of something). Precisely what is being signified depends on two important elements:

• The pre-photographic meaning of what is being framed and photographed by the camera
• The process of de-coding the signs in the photograph, governed as it is by cultural, ideological and personal histories.

Summary of Codes

1 Perceptive codes: studied within the psychology of perception. They establish the conditions for effective perception.

2 Codes of recognition: these build blocs of the conditions of perception into semes - which are blocs of signifieds (for example, black stripes on a white coat) - according to which we recognise objects or recall perceived objects. These objects are often classified with reference to the blocs. The codes are studied within the psychology of intelligence, of memory, or of the learning apparatus, or again within cultural anthropology (see the methods of classification of primitive civilizations).

3 Codes of transmission: these construct the determining conditions for the perception of images - the dots of a newspaper photo, for instance, or the lines which make up a TV image. They can be analysed by the methods of information-theory physics. They establish how to transmit a sensation, not a prefabricated perception. In defining the texture of a certain image, they infringe on the aesthetic qualification of the message and hence give rise to tonal codes, codes of taste, stylistic codes, and codes of the unconscious.

4 Tonal codes: this is the name we are giving to

(i) the systems of optional variants already conventionalized - the prosodic (part of the grammar of language, also related to phoetics, W.H.) features which are connoted by particular intonations of the sign (such as 'strength', 'tension', etc.);
(ii) the true systems of connotations already stylised (for example, the 'gracious' or the 'expressionistic'). These systems of conventions accompany the pure elements of iconic signs as an added or complementary message.

5 Iconic codes: usually based on perceptible elements actualised according to codes of transmission. They are articulated into figures, signs, and semes (something that does not correspond to a word in the verbal language but is still an utterance, a linguistic element that denotes an image or idea: Semanteme) (W.H.).

(a) Figures. These are conditions of perception (e.g. subject background relationship, light contrasts, geometrical values) transcribed into graphic signs according to the rules of the code. These figures are not infinite in number, nor are they always discrete. For this reason the second articulation of the iconic code appears as a continuum of possibilities from which many individual messages emerge, decipherable within the context, but not reducible to a precise code. In fact the code is not yet recognisable, but this is not to say it is absent. At least we know this: if we alter the connection between figures beyond a certain limit, the conditions of perception can no longer be denoted.

(b) Signs. These denote:

(i) semes of recognition (nose, eye, sky, cloud) by conventional graphic means; or
(ii) 'abstract models', symbols, conceptual diagrams of the object (the sun as a circle with radiating lines). They are often difficult to analyse within a seme, since they show up as non-discrete, as part of a graphic continuum. They are recognisable only in the context of the seme.

(c) Semes. These are more commonly known as 'images' or 'iconic signs' (a man, horse, etc.). In fact they formulate a complex iconic phrase (of the kind 'this is a horse standing in profile', or at least 'here is a horse'). They are the most simply catalogued, and an iconic code often works at their level only. Since it is within their context that iconic signs can be recognised, they stand as the key factors in communication of these signs, juxtaposing them one against the other. Semes should therefore be considered - with respect to the signs permitting identification - as an ideolect. Iconic codes shift easily within the same cultural model, or even the same work of art. Here visual signs denote the foreground subject, articulating the conditions of perception into figures; while the background images are reduced to all-encompassing semes of recognition, leaving the rest in shadow. (In this sense the background figures of an old painting, isolated and exaggerated, tend to look like some modern paintings- modern figurative art moving further and further away from the simple reproduction of conditions of perception, to reproduce only a few semes of recognition.)

6 Iconographic codes: these elevate to 'signifier' the 'signified' of iconic codes, in order to connote more complex and culturalised semes (not 'man', 'horse', but 'king', 'Pegasus', 'Bucephalus', or 'ass of Balaam'). Since they are based on all-encompassing semes of recognition, they are recognisable through iconic variations. They give rise to syntagmatic configurations which are very complex yet immediately recognisable and classifiable, such as 'nativity', 'universal justice', 'the four horsemen of the Apocalypse'.

7 Codes of taste and sensibility: these establish (with extreme variability) the connotations provoked by semes of the preceding codes. A Greek temple could connote 'harmonious beauty' as well as 'Grecian ideal' or 'antiquity'. A flag waving in the wind could connote 'patriotism' or 'war' - all connotations dependent on the situation. Thus one kind of actress in one historical period connotes 'grace and beauty', while in another period she looks ridiculous. The fact that immediate reactions of the sensibilities (such as erotic stimuli) are superimposed on this communicative process does not demonstrate that the reaction is natural instead of cultural: it is convention which makes one physical type more desirable than another. Other examples of codification of taste include: an icon of a man with a black patch over one eye, connoting pirate within the iconological code, comes to connote by superimposition 'a man of the world'; another icon connotes 'wicked', and so on.

8 Rhetorical codes: these are born of the conventionalization of as yet unuttered iconic solutions, then assimilated by society to become models or norms of communication. Like rhetorical codes in general, they can be divided into rhetorical figures, premises, and arguments

(a) Visual rhetorical figures These are reducible to verbal, visualised forms. We find examples in metaphor, metonymy, litotes, amplification, etc.

(b) Visual rhetorical premises. These are iconographic semes bearing particular emotive or taste connotations. For example, the image of a man walking into the distance along a never-ending tree-lined road connotes 'loneliness'; the image of a man and woman looking lovingly at a child, which connotes 'family' according to an iconographic code, becomes the premise for an argument along the lines: 'A nice happy family is something to appreciate.'

(c) Visual rhetorical arguments. These are true syntagmatic concatenations imbued with argumentative capacity. They are encountered in the course of film editing so that the succession/opposition between different frames communicates certain complex assertions. For example, 'the character X arrives at the scene of the crime and looks at the corpse suspiciously - he must either be the guilty party, or at least someone who is to gain by the murder'.

9 Stylistic codes: these are determinate original solutions, either codified by rhetoric, or actualised once only. They connote a type of stylistic success, the mark of an 'auteur' (e.g. for a film ending: 'the man walking away along a road until he is only a dot in the distanceChaplin'), or the typical actualisation of an emotive situation (e.g. a woman clinging to the soft drapes of an antechambre with a wanton air - Belle Epoque eroticism'), or again the typical actualisation of an aesthetic ideal, technical-stylistic ideal, etc.

10 Codes of the unconscious: these build up determinative configurations, either iconic or iconological, stylistic or rhetorical. By convention they are held to be capable of permitting certain identifications or projections, of stimulating given reactions, and of expressing psychological situations. They are used particularly in persuasive media.

(http://www.olinda.com/VC/lectures/Narrative.htm)

Roland Barthes - His 5 codes

Narrative Codes
Roland Barthes developed a concept that every narrative is interwoven with five codes that drive one to maintain interest in a story. The first two codes involve ways of creating suspense in narrative, the first by unanswered questions, the second by anticipation of an action’s resolution. These two codes are essentially connected to the temporal order of the narrative.

The Hermeneutic Code
The hermeneutic code refers to plot elements of a story that are not explained. They exist as enigmas that the reader wishes to be resolved. A detective story, for example, is a narrative that operates primarily by the hermeneutic code. A crime is exposed or postulated and the rest of the narrative is devoted to answering questions raised by the initial event.

The Proairetic Code
The proairetic code refers to plot events that imply further narrative action. For example, a story character confronts an adversary and the reader wonders what the resolution of this action will be. Suspense is created by action rather than by a reader’s wish to have mysteries explained. The final three codes are related to how the reader comprehends and interprets the narrative discourse.

The Semic Code
A seme is a unit of meaning or a sign that express cultural stereotypes. These signs allow the author to describe characters, settings and events. The semic code focuses upon information that the narration provides in order to suggest abstract concepts. Any element in a narrative can suggest a particular, often additional, meaning by way of connotation through a correlation found in the narrative. The semic code allows the text to ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’ by describing material things.

The Symbolic Code
The symbolic code refers to a structural structure that organizes meanings by way of antitheses, binary oppositions or sexual and psychological conflicts. These oppositions can be expressed through action, character and setting.

The Cultural Code
The cultural code designates any element in a narrative that refers to common bodies of knowledge such as historical, mythological or scientific. The cultural codes point to knowledge about the way the world works as shared by a community or culture.
Together, these five codes function like a ‘weaving of voices’. Barthes assigns to the hermeneutic the Voice of Truth; to the proairetic code the voice of Empirics ; to the semic the Voice of the Person; to the cultural the Voice of Science; and to the symbolic the Voice of Symbol. According to Barthes, they allow the reader to see a work not just as a single narrative line but as a braiding of meanings that give a story its complexity and richness.

(http://www.narrati.com/Narratology/Narrative_Structure-Codes.htm)

Visual narrative - interesting blog

Visual Narrative

"Recently i’ve done some research on visual narrative. it may seem new to you whom are not deeply in art contextual. it is a new term coined by a group of artist who wanted to called their work of art by their own category. Guess what, the advertising that we student had to do is also under the category of visual narration ! including comic books, paintings and sculpture. but why they have to label it differently ?
Visual narrative are two words that are combined together to describe a series of images with a connection with text. Anyways, according to Pimenta in her article of Design Thought, 2010, the term was came up for granted. the usage of the word “Visual” is to replace pictorial, which was used in late nineteenth century and it is a Latin word. Pictorial word seems too strong for them and they convert it into something synonym yet lighter, visual. while “Narrative” is an act of narration.
So here are a few examples of visual narrative in my context of understanding. It is used in Advertising, Comics, Storyboard, and Photography specifically Photojournalism."

 I came across this blog (http://nuramalinaishak.tumblr.com/) which had an interesting post on visual narrative in terms of imagery.
I decided to include it as a reference point, highlighting the many different forms visual narrative takes in art and the visual image.

Dictee AND La Jetee

In uni today we watched La Jetee, I decided to look into this further and came across a blog where someone had writhed in detail about La Jeete and similarities between a novel titles Dictee.

I found this really interesting to read and it helped my understanding of the film viewed today in class.

There is no future, only the onslaught of time.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (NY: Tanam Pres, 1982) is an experiment in autobiography that blends poetry and prose, history and memoir, and reproductions of photographs and documents.  Many of Cha’s themes overlap with those found in the work of W.G. Sebald: history, memory, war, cruelty, family.
To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know.  Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction.  They exist only in the larger perception of History’s recording, that affirmed, admittedly and unmistakably, one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another.  Not physical enough.  Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue.
To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.

But Cha adds additional layers: Catholicism and feminism.  Dictee opens with Communion, followed by confession, and it closes with a scene embodying acts of charity (water, medicine, advice) between a woman and a young girl.  Overseeing Cha’s enterprise are the nine classical Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory) who presided over the arts and sciences.  Each of Dictee‘s chapters is assigned the name of a Muse.  The history that Cha probes is the story of twentieth century Korea (where her family originated): the Occupation by Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese War; the country’s division into two parts as a result of the Cold War; and the violent student demonstrations of the 1960s.
But Cha’s main concern, it seems to me, is human communication itself.  Dictee (the dictation) is structured as an unending struggle to move from inarticulateness to utterance.  Words become syllables, sentences become strings of single words, continuity is disrupted.   Where, Cha seems to ask, does language become meaning?  Parts of the book are written in French and there are many references to the issues of translation and multilingualism.
Dictee is heavily influenced by film theory.  It contains abrupt jump cuts, makes powerful use of vantage point, and dwells on the intellectual dichotomy of listening to spoken language while reading sub-titles in a different language.  Following the lead of Michel Butor and other French writers of the nouveau roman, Cha sometimes moves into second person in an attempt to obliterate the boundary between reader and subject.

Her movements are already punctuated by the movement of the camera, her pace, her time, her rhythm.  You move from the same distance as the visitor, with the same awe, same reticence, the same anticipation.  Stationary on the light never still on her bath water, then slowly moving from room to room, through the same lean and open spaces.  Her dress hangs on a door, the cloth is of a light background, revealing the surface with a landscape stained with the slightest of hue.  Her portrait is not represented in a still photograph, nor in a painting.  All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her.  You do not see her.  For the moment, you see only her traces.

More than once, as I read Dictee, I was eerily reminded of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.
A decade ahead of Sebald, Cha interlaced her text with uncredited news photographs, portraits, reproductions of documents, and even reproductions of what appear to be the handwritten manuscript for the pages of Dictee.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea, but raised in the US.  After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied filmmaking and critical theory in Paris.  A week after Dictee was published, she was murdered by a stranger on the streets of New York.  Tanam Press was an important publisher of avantgarde art titles (Jenny Holzer, Reese Williams, Philip Glass, Werner Herzog, Richard Prince) from 1980 to 1986

Constructed almost entirely from black and white stills, Chris Marker creates the science fiction film, La Jetee. 

I think this piece of work is very successful at holding the viewers attention for such a long period of time. (below  have included some stills from the movie which i watched online then used the screen capture feature to collect some of the still moments)

"I written several times before about some of the parallels I see between the art of W.G. Sebald and Chris Marker.  Recently, Afterall Books began issuing a new series of books (distributed by MIT Press), each of which is based on a single work of art, such as Hanne Darboven’s Cultural History, 1880-1983 (owned by the Dia Foundation) Yvonne Rainer’s The Mind Is a Muscle, and Marker’s La Jetée.  Reading Chris Marker: La Jetée byJanet Harbord only convinced me further that their work has much in common.
As Harbord notes, La Jetée “tells the story of a man marked by an image rather than a memory.”  This is a pretty good description of Sebald’s enterprise of discovering the history he did not experience through images, object, and walks; and this seems particularly true of Austerlitz, in which Jacques Austerlitz tries to uncover a family history he that had been kept from him most of his life.
The broken statues and half-demolished buildings that populate many of La Jetée‘s images suggest the very incompleteness of both experience and memory.  At the same time, this sense of incompleteness “allows our own supplementation, our own interpretive creations, to take root.”  Sebald, whose real topic can be said to be history, turned to narrative fiction precisely because he felt that only an act of the imagination could bring us closer to experiencing other times and other people’s lives.  Not surprisingly, the characters in Marker’s film and Sebald’s books frequent museums.  The museum provides each artist with a complex commentary on the tangled relationship between history and the artifice that is memory.  It serves as both a starting point in one’s exploration of the past, as well as a dead end.
When Harbord writes of Marker’s work on Alain Resnais’ 1955 Holocaust film Night and Fog, she notes that “the [film's] narration  articulates questions of memory as place…Place is the retainer of traumatic memory if we know how to look.”
In one of the final images of the film the camera moves across the surface of a ceiling in a chamber.  The narrator says this: ‘The only sign – but you have to know – is this ceiling, dug into by fingernails.’  The sentence hangs in the air in its ambiguity, or its fullness of meaning – ‘you have to know’ inferring that you need to be told for the nail marks to become legible….you need to bear this knowledge from the past.  The question of what we can bear to know of the past, and of what this means for the future, is laid before us in this moment.  At the centre of this circle of questions is the place of images, their ability, or not, to retain and pass on ‘facts’, trauma and meaning – in short, to deal with the ineffable.
This, of course, was the challenge for Sebald and it remains the challenge for us who try to come to grips with the success or failure of this aspect of his work.  Can evidence ever become experience?  The quote from Harbord immediately above reminded me of the ending of Austerlitz, where Sebald refers to another book – Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom.  Here’s what I wrote previously:
Toward the end of Heshel’s Kingdom, Jacobson comes across evidence of a totally different kind.  This is evidence left by Jewish prisoners being held in the infamous Fort IX in Kaunas, originally designed to protect the country from invaders, but used by the Nazis to terrorize and eliminate Lithuanian and European Jews.  It is with this event that Sebald ends his book Austerlitz.  In the bowels of the fort, where many thousands of Jews from all over Europe were held, tortured, and slaughtered, Jacobson comes across names and dates scratched into the walls between 1941 and 1944.  “Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44″, one says.  Another reads “Nous sommes neuf cents Francais.”  We are nine hundred Frenchmen.  As evidence, these stark scratchings seem minor in comparison to the visible horror of the photographs Jacobson has seen, but he suggests that these simple attempts to be remembered, to be human, have a chilling veracity and authenticity far more powerful than documents made by the killers of these same people.


I was mesmerized watching Chris Marker’s two films La Jetée and Sans Soleil on DVD last night. It wasn’t long before I realized there are fascinating connections between Marker’s films and W.G. Sebald’s books. La Jetée (1962) is a photo-roman, the cinematic version of a photo-novel, constructed entirely of haunting still photographs and a single voice-over which relates the story. The circular narrative involves a young boy who, upon visiting Orly airport to see the planes with his parents, witnesses a death and becomes fixated on his memory of the event. Years later when Paris and presumably much of the world is annihilated by atomic warfare, the man’s obsessive memory link to this pre-apocalypse event makes him an ideal candidate for involuntary time travel experiments, conducted by his captors, who hope to discover a way to acquire medicines and supplies from the past or the future. (The conquerors speak in untranslated German, and its hard not to compare their pseudo-medical experiments with those conducted by the Nazis.) Over the course of repeated trips to pre-apocalypse Paris, the man ultimately discovers that it is he, the time-traveler, who is killed on the jetée of Orly airport to the everlasting horror of himself as a child.
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.
Even though La Jetée is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film (and the basis for Terry Gilliam’sTwelve Monkeys), it is, like the work of Sebald, deliberately antiquarian. The film seems longer than its brief 19 minutes length. Marker’s use of still images gives it the rhythm of a slide show (while reminding us of the early films of the Lumière brothers), but the pace also results from the fact that the film is visually rich and densely allusive. There’s just a lot to look at and multiple directions to explore before the next image appears. Although I didn’t catch this the first time through, La Jetée is an homage to Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. And this, to my mind, brings things full circle back to Sebald. Marker and Sebald are both artists whose works are structured around the ideas of history, memory, nature, ritual, apocalypse. For me, some of the most evocative scenes inLa Jetée occur in a natural history museum, redolent of the narrators in Sebald’s books who wander through museums and zoos. The man (and the woman he falls in love with during his time-travels to pre-apocalypse Paris) views the melancholy beauty of the twice-dead bestiary, for he alone bears the knowledge that these dead and stuffed animals are soon to become extinct as species."

(http://sebald.wordpress.com/category/chris-marker/)

Todorov’s theory

Todorov’s theory Tzvetan Todorov simplified the idea of narrative theory whilst also allowing a more complex interpretation of film texts with his theory of Equilibrium and Disequilibrium.

The theory is simply this:

• The fictional environment begins with a state of equilibrium (everything is as it should be)
• It then suffers some disruption (disequilibrium)
• New equilibrium is produced at the end of the narrative

Seems simple enough and easily applicable to all films! But theories can never be THAT easy!

There are five stages the narrative can progress through:

•  A state of equilibrium (all is as it should be)
• A disruption of that order by an event
• A recognition that the disorder has occurred
• An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption

A return or restoration of a NEW equilibrium

Here narrative is not seen as a linear structure but a circular one.
The narrative is driven by attempts to restore the equilibrium.
However, the equilibrium attained at the end of the story is not identical to the initial equilibrium.
Todorov argues that narrative involves a transformation. The characters or the situations are transformed through the progress of the disruption.
The disruption itself usually takes place outside the normal social framework, outside the ‘normal’ social events.
E.g.      a murder happens and people are terrified
            Someone vanishes and the characters have to solve the mystery

So, remember:

• Narratives don’t need to be linear.
• The progression from initial equilibrium to restoration always involves a transformation.
• The middle period of a narrative can depict actions that transgress everyday habits and routines.
• There can be many disruptions whilst seeking a new equilibrium (horror relies on this technique).
  
  
  (http://www.adamranson.plus.com/TODOROV.HTM)

Closed Narrative structure

"A Closed Narrative structure is most commonly found in movies. As mentioned before, movies generally exist as one unique story, and contain a beginning, middle and an ending. A story is unravelled before an audience, and then ultimately brought to a conclusion. A closed narrative in a movie does not necessarily mean no sequels can be made. There can be prequels, set before the chronology of the first movie, or a sequel that can create an all-new story, with the same characters. But strictly speaking, they can still be movies in their own right. The James Bond movies (1962-1999), which total 19 separate movies involving the same characters, provide a good example of this."

Learning more about narrative structure (x2 slideshows)

Narrative structure from itsyourlife (http://www.slideshare.net/itsyourlife/narrative-structure-6434995)

Narrative theories from Sarah media film (http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmediafilm/narrative-theories-6722640)

Linear, non-linear and realist narrative structures

" A linear narrative structure is a story line that runs from star to end in chronological order including no flashbacks or flash-forwards and not broken up in anyway. The most popular linear story lines are included in Soaps such as Coronation Street and Eastenders.

Non-linear narratives can be made in anyway possible including random orders, flashbacks or flash-forwards. This type of narrative structure can be very effective when making a film, as you may want to reveal the end of the story before you begin to tell the start. A lot of films by Tarantino are non-linear.
Flashbacks are points in a narrative story line were it goes back in time to show something that has happened in the past. There are several ways that the director can enter a flashback. Such as a bright flash, or zooming right into the eye or face. The flashbacks usually exit the same way as they entered although this is not necessary.
Flash-forwards are the opposites of flashbacks; they are used to show the audience a section of the future that is important to the story line. These are very similar to the flashbacks in the way that they are presented, however flash-forwards are frequently used to open a film.

Realist narratives are story lines that are believable by that audience because they appear real, or are based on a true story that has happened in the past. This is a used to good effect in many horror films as something is much scarier to the audience if it could happen or has happened before in the past. The Blair Witch project is a very good example of a realist narrative as it if filmed using a hand held camera, this could be done by anyone using a camera. This is scarier because it feels real.
Anti-Realism is a narrative that is blatantly not realistically filmed, and used a lot of after effects. Providing the movie involves good quality effects and actor’s anti-realism can be used to create good films in all different genres by applying suitable effects. Star Wars is the most popular example of an Anti-Realism narrative. "

(http://stramsbottom.edublogs.org/narrative-structures/)

Equilibrium

Everyday life.

Disruption

Something happens to change equilibrium.

Conflict

Trying to solve the problem.

Resolution

Problem is sorted.

New Equilibrium

Back to normal but never the same.

Linear

A-B-C

Circular

C-A-B (There should be an arrow pointing from the B to the C)

Non Linear

C-B-D-A

Todorav

The sequence of events drive the narrative.