Maisy - Narrative

Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

The coursework production in which the theories of narrative are most prominent are in my A2 music video. The video highly relies on the quantity of the narrative which gives the piece fluidity and supports the performance bed. The narrative allows the audience to follow a young woman as she escapes the claws of an ambiguous governmental organization. This main theme shows elemental support of Lyotard’s postmodern theory that there is a lack of faith in anything new and that this causes a rise in dystopian narratives which break conventions of the modernist idea of grand narratives. The bleakness of the narrative is portrayed through the dim, blue colourings which Final Cut Pro allowed me to do. As the female character Rhi escapes the physical and metaphorical prison by hearing the band play and then running out of the place where she’s been captured, she rejects what she should be doing and rejects the band and masked figures, creating herself as an opposition to what holds her. Levi-Strauss’ theory of all stories holding binary oppositions of sort can be seen in my music video as Rhi and the band itself, the lead singer primarily, are binary oppositions, leading the audience to relate and form a preference to the female protagonist. The production fits into Barthes’ five narrative codes as the ending to the piece in enigmatic in that you, as the audience, do not find out what happens to Rhi once she is caught by the antagonist – does he let her go? Does he kill her? What happens and what will happen is unclear and is left up to the viewer to decide and imagine. Barthes’ cultural code also applies to my film as the body of knowledge being the controlling governmental organisation that fuels the narrative, depicts the way we see the world being controlled through CCTV and surveillance which is a rapidly growing debate in our society. We tried to keep the anonymity of the organization throughout the video but slowly built up the tension of what they symbolized through more screen time and this follows Barthes’ code of action, in which the audience is kept guessing as the tension increases throughout the film.

In the video’s narrative there is a strong case of Todorov’s theory of equilibrium – the film starts out with stability as characters come into an abandoned area to watch the band play and they are unfazed by this. The second stage being the disruption comes at the climax of the first chorus, in the form of Rhi causing disequilibrium by challenging the norm and escaping the place, running out into the city of London. The third stage of recognizing what has happened appears as a masked figure from the organisation chases after her, causing a fast step forward in the action of the narrative. Equilibrium is brought back into place right at the end of the video, when the masked figure/ lead singer and Rhi come face to face, juxtaposing and awaiting finality in the narrative of what will happen. Although there are many theorists to support the narrative structure of my music video, there are some theories that do not apply to it such as Pam Cook who argues that the key to the standard Hollywood narrative structure includes a strong closing and end to the narrative. In my video, the narrative is largely based on the ambiguity of the characters and their situations and I played on this to build interest and a climax in the story, so because of the this, I decided the ending of the film needed to be just as dramatic and cliff-hanging as the rest of the video. Because of this, I broke the conventions which Cook’s theory argues, including the idea that the classic narrative has verisimilitude in which I also rejected to keep the narrative overall, and especially at the end, enigmatic. In conclusion, on the whole, there are many theories of narrative which support the decisions I made to keep the music video story’s plot interesting and dynamic.