Interesting subject.
““To say that Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors violates every narrative code and representational system known to the cinema is an understatement”
This seems to be an overstatement. If it violated every code and representational system, I think it would be utterly incomprehensible but it’s not. It’s not even Head. It’s still using the devices of narrative although subverting them every step of the way. Does Dog Star Man do this? I’m not sure. Narrative is tricky since you can say that every film tells a story yet we distinguish narrative from non-narrative film (non-narrative often being code for “experimental”). If you say that a film redefines narrative, I guess you first need a good idea of what narrative is.
“Are there any other films you’ve seen that engage with narrative in a purely visual fashion?”
But isn’t this just saying that film is a visual medium that tells stories through images as its dominant narrative form? Silent films are obviously all examples of this. Even if they have intertitles, they are visual. As a general rule, narrative in film shouldn’t be about telling but showing (it’s generally a problem with films that use a too predominant voice over to explain what is taking place on screen).
Haven’t seen that yet but it’s high on my list.
What about Reconstruction? I film about a murder, and they jump back and forth through both the events leading up to the murder and the investigation, and not even bi-linearly. Then they never show the actual murder.
Michael Snow’s Le Region Centrale wins this thread.
I think when one considers narrative a Godard quip is a possible starting point:
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.
In Film socialisme 2010 the narrative is straightforward enough in three acts:
the intro – Things like that
the conflict – Quo Vadis Europa
the resolution – Our humanities
In visual terms, the narrative is disintegrated and there is a conceptual space to be bridged.
A style in opposition to Film Socialisme is Jansco’s The Confrontation 1969 discussed by Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film Bordwell (1985), Chapter 7: Narration and Space
Here the visual narrative is seamless, the story is integrated into the visual – i.e. as much as it could be, the visual is the narrative.
Bordwell on Jansco:
the long take makes a stylistic unit (a shot) also a syuzhet unit (a scene), there is an unusually tight connection between narrative comprehension and spatial perception
Bordwell is showing us how a story can be told visually, in this case by Jansco. This is an excellent read as he unlocks the technique that “refuses omnipresence but flaunts omniscience”
i.e. The stylistic space carries all the narrative knowns.
I for one believe all a story needs is a middle. But, you should probably also have a start and an end if you have no good reason not to.
@RWP
There’s also some interesting similar commentary in ‘How Comics Work’. People perceive the passage of time according to the size of the panel. The bigger the scene you see, the more time you feel has passed.
“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.”
Unfortunately, by the 1990s with Pulp Fiction et all. these kinds of chronological contortions became a cliche and a tired device. And then came Memento and Irreversible and the “reverse order” narrative.
What narratives require is temporality since it’s a mode of organizing time.
@ Jirin
hmmm ….got a link – I would like to read that.
@ Ari narratives require is temporality since it’s a mode of organizing time.
Kind of redundant….how about narratives form a totality by way of temporality?
I don’t think narratives form a totality though. They can be fragmented, fractured, and incomplete (they usually are). I would say temporality is they key element to distinguish narrative from non-narrative film. I’m not sure how Dog Star Man is temporal – it seems its contribution to cinema was its atemporality – its refusal of narrative entirely.
Yeah, I was gonna ask the OP how Dog Star Man works on a narrative level.
I don’t think narratives form a totality though. They can be fragmented, fractured, and incomplete (they usually are).
So you disagree with Godard?
Resnais: fragmented, fractured, and eliptical
Yet they produce a totality, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Almost anyone who has read books and watched films can write a script using an alternate chronological line as Pulp Fiction does, it of course takes its time, but it’s not (from my point of view) the hardest narrative one could attempt to use.
I think the real challenge for a screenwriter is to create an atmosphere not using events but the lack of them, like some avant-garde do. Making things tacit and leading the viewer through exactly the path we want them to go through, taking them to a single conclusion. that’s what makes writing a script of this kind so difficult. What some could think of as the absence of something, is for a preparated person the presence of another element.
“So you disagree with Godard?”
I think Godard was being typically flippant in responding to the assertion that his films didn’t have recognizable narrative structures.
“Yet they produce a totality, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Sure, films are obviously temporal objects in and of themselves so they have beginnings, middle, and ends – but in that sense it seems too self-evident to say that they are totalities. But I don’t think I would make the same statement about narrative which are often when done well open-ended in the sense that Santropez argues which is against single conclusions but also defined as much by absences.
@Santropez
Why should it lead everyone to one conclusion? ;)
Yeah, nonlinear organization of plot is less surprising than it used to be, but that doesn’t mean every appearance of it is cliche. It’s easier to write a conventional narrative and make it compelling than an unconventional one. You should use alternative narrative styles because you have a good artistic reason to do so, not just added to a normal story for the sake of being different.
What matters in Dog Star Man, as in so much of Brakhage’s work, is presence, duration. Gene Youngblood holds up this work as a paradigm of synaesthetic cinema; instead of giving the impression of two images sharing the same frame (as in traditional cinema), Youngblood maintains, the superimposition (extremely rapid in Prelude, somewhat slower in Part One) allows the viewer to see one image in metamorphosis. The quick cutting disrupts temporal unity – each shot refuses any linkage with its neighbour, the time field is fragmented. Space is flattened. Surface is everything. Most of Brakhage’s work – and it holds true for many experimental filmmakers – is relatable to the idea of the viewer as “constituting instance” (in Malcolm LeGrice’s words) of the film, which takes the load off narrative, and puts the load on you and me…
For me, music is a form of abstract narrative – it’s narrative without concrete signifiers. It’s the form of narrative with all the objects of the real world stripped away. It’s beginnings, middles and ends, conflicts and resolutions, etc. In that sense, I don’t find it at all inappropriate to consider Brakhage’s films from a narrative perspective. I actually wrote my doctoral thesis about a lot of this – I used a semiotic music analysis framework to analyze a Brakhage film, and used a narrative analysis framework to analyze some contemporary (avant garde) music, the point being to illustrate the deeper connections between the two media. I’m just a dilettante in these areas, but there are serious narrative music analysts whose thinking is quite sophisticated, and I find their ideas are perfectly applicable to much abstract film as well.
That said, as far as Paradjanov’s films go, I’ve never considered their approach to narrative to be among their more interesting features. And Paradjanov is possibly my favorite filmmaker. :-)
@Jirin
Because if not the story would be just a bunch of images, dialogues (if there are any), movements, etc.
An offense to the audience in someway, making them believe there’s something going on when it’s not.
Redifine? Resnais did it twice with Marienbad and Hiroshima. What Tarantino and Nolan do is just shuffle linear narratives around. Witness the DVD option for Memento and Follow which can be viewed as straight narratives. A Lego™ toy kind of narrative.
if not the story would be just a bunch of images, dialogues (if there are any), movements, etc
Pretty much how many felt about Film Socialisme.
I need to get back to this thread to add more but let me briefly agree that Tarantino and Nolan have done absolutely nothing to redefine narrative.
EDIT—Ahh, okay, I’ve read the thread and thankfully no one was arguing the contrary! My misanthropy snuck thru.
I had a hard time following Mulholland Drive the first time I saw it.
I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
Ditto on Inland Empire (although in this case, I didn’t care).
Tarantino and Nolan have done absolutely nothing to redefine narrative.
C’mon Josh – Memento, Run Lola Run and Irreversible are working with the phenomenology of temporal perception, which would be a subset of narrative not a redefinition of narrative.
Not sure how that is a response to what I said.
It wasn’t the intent of those films to redefine narrative – not sure that was with Resnais’ films either.
Yes, yes—as i stated in my edit I was erroneously responding to a post that I thought was making that argument.
@Santropez
I mean, are you saying there must be one clear canonical clear interpretation of the images on screen, decided on with intent by the director?
Images can shape your emotional experience in all kinds of different ways.
@RWP
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326423348&sr=8-1
Fascinated by the many directions in which this thread is moving.
@Neil
Some of the descriptions Youngblood uses in his analysis of Brakhage’s Dog Star Man—“synaesthetic cinema”, “images in metamorphosis”—are apt observations of the redefinition of narrative I was alluding to also in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Tree of Life.
The key difference I see between these films and those of directors such as Resnais, for example, is that in Resnais communication (even in absence) is still the dominant influence. The narrative is rearranged and reordered yet still literary, if in a sparser and more ambiguous form than the more linear and conventional majority of narratives. (And, as mentioned, in Godard this becomes mere play and in Tarantino and other postmodern pastiches a cliche.)
The subject is still detached from the object and we the audience still perceive the boundaries of the images.
Whereas filmmakers such as Brakhage and Paradjanov give primacy to the presence of the, for lack of a better term, hieratic image and its effects upon the duration of the narrative flow, thereby altering and redefining the narrative structure itself.
Here the subject is merged within the object—we the audience take on the perspective of the object and the experience transforms from intellectual to one of sensations, in which our mind bypasses the usual narrative boundaries which define and constrict the image so that it becomes complexly alive with our own myriad intuitions.
I would love to hear others’ opinions on this vast (and admittedly vague) topic. Can someone resurrect it?
“The subject is still detached from the object and we the audience still perceive the boundaries of the images.”
So in Paradjanov and Brakhage the subject and object are not detached? They are the same? I don’t understand words like hieratic, so please rephrase.
I think big picture so it’s often difficult for me to elaborate on details.
I’m specifically referring to the way the camera presents the space and how that affects narrative. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Dog Star Man the camera views the subject from the perspective of an object (through tree limbs and other features of nature) which alters the flow of the narrative and causes us as the audience to experience the film on a different level—purely visual—which allows us to associate our own intuitions with the unfolding images. (This occurs in The Tree of Life, too.)
Graveyard Poet
I’ve been obsessed with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors lately. It has been in my top 5 for over 5 years now and it’s been on my mind recently not only because it ended up in the 3rd spot on the MUBI users Top 20, which was quite a surprise to me, but because of its one-of-a-kind position in the history of cinema.
J. Hoberman, in his Village Voice article, quotes David A. Cook’s essay “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Film As Spiritual Art” in situating the film in the context of redefining the parameters of cinema: “To say that Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors violates every narrative code and representational system known to the cinema is an understatement—at times, in fact, the film seems intent upon deconstructing the very process of representation itself.”
Hoberman then goes on to identify one film that correlates with Paradjanov’s and can truly be called a revolutionary breakthrough: Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde masterwork Dog Star Man:
“Parajanov’s impossible camera angles and onrushing camera maneuvers, his use of bold superimpositions, seasonal structure, and pagan mentality, are all akin to Brakhage’s.”
Dog Star Man is also in my top 5—one of the rare films which was a truly eye-opening experience for me. Illustrating Jung’s synchronicity, both films were shot in wide-open wilderness (the Carpathian mountains of the Ukraine, the Colorado Rockies of the United States) and released in the pivotal year of 1964.
Both of these films, in my opinion, expanded the boundaries of the medium far beyond their predecessors and successors.
One of the few contemporary films, in my opinion, to redefine narrative in such a visionary way is The Tree of Life.
Of course, the question of narrative remains a hotly debated topic. I would be fascinated to hear others’ opinions on this sweeping subject.
Narrative in cinema has been redefined on a technical level of cinematography and editing (the deep focus of Gregg Toland and discontinuous structure of Citizen Kane or the stately, dialogue-free sections of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sequence) and on the storytelling level itself (Bergman’s intense close-ups and confessional characterizations, Godard’s improvised scripts, Resnais’ dislocations of time/memory, Antonioni’s subjugation of the characters to their surroundings of urban anomie, Tarkovsky’s long-take aesthetic and philosophical conversations.)
The filmmakers mentioned above were still mainly enthralled by communication (narrative) and its discontents (even when there was a lack of words.)
What most captivates me in cinema is when it enters the realms of purely visual exploration.
What films have redefined narrative for you? Are there any other films you’ve seen that engage with narrative in a purely visual fashion?