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Part I. Interdisciplinary Approach to Storytelling ] 29
as an analyzable, stable structure of film narrative and identified eight types
of seguences.
The story arcis present in scenes, situations, and the narrative as a whole.
Branigans (1984) meta-theory of film narrative is not so much based
on the conceptual framework of narratology, but on the interweaving of
representations. He thus eliminates the narrator and makes use of the notion
of frames instead, asserting that film narrative is multi-layered, with multiple
narratives in hierarchical relation to each other.
Bordwell (1988), on the other hand, argues that a narratological approach
can be integrated into film theory, but not on the basis of Propp’s morphological
framework. His critique examines the procedures of film analysis in which
analysts draw analogies between the Proppian functions found in folk tales
and the set of functions and structural organization found in certain television
or Hollywood film narratives. He argues that there are major differences
between the oral history of the prefeudal era and the history narrated in the
age of capitalism. Bordwell argued that film narrative has structural elements
which are specific only to motion pictures, and therefore the conceptual
framework of linguistic communication that is suitable for the analysis of
verbal narration cannot be applied to the analysis of communication in film
(Kovacs, 1998).
For film narratology, the breakthrough came with the analysis of film as
texture, which decoupled narrative from the medium of narration. Kovacs
(1998) describes the three focal points of film narrative research as
(1) the point of view of the narrative; (2) the subject of the narrative (i.e., the
narrator); and (3) the nature of the world revealed in the narrative. Or, to put
it another way: where they are talking from, who is talking, and what they
are talking about. Other aspects of the general problematics of narrative - the
chronology, the logic of narrative exposition, the structural units of narrative ¬
do not seem to represent the real cornerstones of the specificity of film narrative,
at least this is what the film narratological literature suggests.
It is more difficult to find the narrator in film than in literature. Kovacs points
out that in film narratology, it is more relevant to consider perspective than
the narrator since film always sees events from some (or someone's) point
of view, showing as opposed to narrating with language.
In verbal narration, it is the narrator’s voice that sustains the narrative, but in
visual narration, these tools of expression are based on visual features. Casetti
(1994) notes the ability of film to combine Platonic mimesis and diegesis,
allowing film narrative to both present and imitate. The difference between
film and drama is that a film can change the point of view and perspective. It
is the feature by which characters can be emphasized or even relegated to the
background (Kovacs, 2002). Jost (1987) described the levels of organization
in motion picture narration. According to him, cinematic narration can be