Visual Narrative and Media

What is narrative?

It simply called story-telling which consists of a series of events, time, locations and actors. Narrative can be found either in dramas, movies, newspapers, journals, books and many more, which function as telling the story of their lives or experiences. According to Fisher, “narration – communication rotted in time and space – covers every aspect of our lives and the lives of others regard to character, motive and action”.

The natures of narrative are Story and Discourse. Story is more to what the main agenda, the content, setting, actors, time and location, the story plot meanwhile Discourse is more on how the narrative is being told. Discourse makes the story more understandable.

The structure of narrative according to Aristotle’s Dramatic structure is a story need to have a beginning, middle and end, where Aristotle quote, “we have laid it down that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole maybe no magnitude to speak of – now a whole is that which has beginning, middle and end”.

There are two types of components in visual narrative, which are structuralism and post-structuralism.

Structuralism

Structuralism basically means that the narrative are being structured according to a typical concept where according to Strauss “Studies that structure of social system – Binary system create most social events – good or bad, right or wrong, light or dark. All elements of a culture and society are relational”. This kind of narrative often use in folktales, cartoons, and most films and movies. Take this folktale cartoon for example:-

This is an animation cartoon based on fantasy, where the characters are based on a princess, a prince, a king and a villain. The discourses of this cartoon are friendship between the princess and the fishes and her father, forbidden love between the princess and the prince and the battle of power between the king and the villain. The princess often be the damsels in distress and the prince will be saving her from evil and they will be happily ever after.

Post-Structuralism

Post-structuralism basically means that it is the opposite of structuralism, where there is no structured narrative, the meaning is unstable and we will not know what to expect from this kind of movie or films, the meaning are not logically connected as what the producer intended. For example:-

This movie is called the Epic Movie, where the has unstable meaning or plot to its structure, we didn’t know the story line of this movie until we actually see it because this movie are combination from all kind of movies which some are from Pirate of the Caribbean, Narnia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The story line is not logically connected to any of the plot, where in the middle of nowhere superman appeared but burned down and dead. As we all know superman is unbeatable and strong and how in hell he can be dead just like that. There is no coherent meaning that the producers intended to send to their viewers.  


References:

•  Griffin. E., A. (2009). A First Look at Communication Theory (7^th ed.). Narrative Paradigm of Walter Fisher (p.299-300). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Lamarque. P. Narrative and Invention: The Limits of fictionality.
• Huisman. R. Narrative concepts.
•  Aristotle. Aristotle on the art of poetry. Retrieved on September 25^th, 2011 from http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=AriPoet.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=7&division=div1.
• Chandler. D. Semiotics for Beginners. Retrieved on September 25^th, 2011 from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html.

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