当前课程知识点:英语电影与文化 > Unit 12 The English Patient: Critical Analysis > Unit 12 The English Patient: Critical Analysis > Unit 3 Film Narrative I
Open secrets of classical storytelling: Narrative analysis 101
Monday | January 11, 2016
Premium Rush (David Koepp, 2012).
DB here:
After nine years, over 700 entries, and many essays and other stuff, this contraption of a website has started to intimidate us.
If we’re intimidated, you might be flabbergasted. Although a set of categories sits on the right to guide your exploration of this tangled databank, those too loom large and discouraging. So we’ve decided to tidy up by–how else?–adding another entry.
We’ll occasionally offer a stripped-down guide to our writing on certain topics. We’ll steer you to entries that we think represent the core of our thinking on a problem, and then add some that probe more deeply, for those who want to go beyond the basics. Since one of our areas is narrative theory and analysis, a good first effort, we thought, would be to produce a sort of DIY syllabus that systematically surveys the topic as we’ve explored it. And since we’ve often written about classical Hollywood storytelling, and since many of our readers are interested in that…well, the syllabus sort of wrote itself.
We call these ideas open secrets of storytelling because by and large they aren’t acknowledged in the screenplay manuals that aspiring writers read. In most cases, we’ve had to devise our own concepts and terms, based on watching hundreds of movies. Yet these observations are wide open, available in our books and on this site.
Now comes our chance to pull them together. The result isn’t an utterly comprehensive theory of classical Hollywood narrative, but it does give a fair sampling of the range of questions we’ve tried to answer about it. The topics, linked to essays and blog entries, are arranged in three layers.
The most basic layer is an array of key ideas about story worlds, plot structures, and strategies of narration. These ideas are introduced in the first entry, “Understanding film narrative: The trailer.” Discussions of other basic concepts follow. Just reading the entries pegged to those topics, you could get a solid sense of what we’re aiming at. For most of those, we also propose a film you might view to test how the ideas work.
At a second level, for some topics we include some entries that dig deeper. They’re either more complex and advanced, or they provide some historical background.
Finally, after we’ve reviewed the key topics, we add a batch of case studies that use several of the tools we’ve laid out. These are usually very deep dives into particular films. They aim to show how the analytical ideas can bring out distinctive features of particular movies. The case studies are pretty wide-ranging, but they tend to hover around specific problems, such as adaptation or the creation of fantasy worlds.
How could you use this resource? A teacher in high school or college could draw on it as a partial syllabus or just a thumbnail list of supplementary material for a course. Teachers using Film Art: An Introduction could treat it as a supplement to our section of Chapter 3 on classical narrative. Or a student might find an idea for a paper in this vicinity.
Since we’ve always tried to link film studies and filmmaking, we hope that practitioners might be interested too. For example, an aspiring screenwriter could take this as a weekly reading/viewing agenda, treating it as a free course in story analysis. General readers who simply want to know more about the mechanics of cinematic storytelling should find something provocative here too. For everybody: Feel free to use it as Narrative Analysis 101.
We thank our many loyal readers of this blog, as well as the many more who have just dropped by once or twice. Your continued interest has helped us keep going.
-1.1 Overview
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-1.2 Mise-en-scène: setting
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-1.3 Mise-en-scène: lighting
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-1.4 Mise-en-scène: character appearance
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-1.5 Mise-en-scène: performance
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-1.6 Screen space and composition
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-1.7 Case study
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-Unit1 Questions for discussion
-Unit 1 单元测试
-2.1 Introduction of cinematography
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-2.2 Cinematography: angle of framing
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-2.3 Cinematography: camera distance
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-2.4 Cinematography: mobile framing
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-2.5 Case study
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-Unit 2 Questions for discussion
-Unit 2 单元测试
-3.1 Overview
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-3.2 Openings, closings, and story development
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-3.3 Range of story information: restricted or unrestricted
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-Unit 3 Questions for discussion
-Unit 3 单元测试
-4.1 Overview
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-4.2 Editing and speed of narrative
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-4.3 Chronology and continuity editing
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-4.4 Flashbacks and editing
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-Unit 4 Questions for Discussion
-Unit 4 单元测试
-5.1 Overview
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-5.2 What is semiotics?
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-5.3 Christian Metz
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-5.4 Roland Barthes (Part 1)
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-5.5 Roland Barthes (Part 2)
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-5.6 Case study: 2001: A Space Odyssey
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-Unit 5 Questions for Discussion
-Unit 5 单元测试
-6.1 Overview
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-6.2 Origins of film ideology
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-6.3 Media and technology
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-6.4 Cultural hegemony and counterhegemony
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-6.5 Case study: Star Trek
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-Unit 6 Questions for discussion
-Unit 6 单元测试
-7.1 Overview
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-7.2 Woman and film
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-7.3 Feminist film theory and practice
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-7.4 Case study: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
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-7.5 Masculinity
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-7.6 Queer Cinema
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-Unit 7 Questions for discussion
-Unit 7 单元测试
-8.1 Overview
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-8.2 Race and racism
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-8.3 Stereotypes of racial representation
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-8.4 Whiteness
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-8.5 Case study: Rabbit-Proof Fence
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-Unit 8 Questions for discussion
-Unit 8 单元测试
-9.1 Overview
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-9.2 Edward Said and Orientalism
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-9.3 Cultural Imperialism
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-9.4 Self-orientation
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-9.5 Case study I: Mulan
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-9.6 Case study II: M Butterfly
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-Unit 9 Questions for discussion
-Unit 9 单元测试
-10.1 Overview
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-10.2 Early Background
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-10.3 Jacques Lacan
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-10.4 Laura Mulvey
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-10.5 Case Study: Shutter Island
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-Unit 10 Questions for discussion
-Unit 10 单元测试
-Unit 10 Film and Psychoanalysis
-11.1 Overview
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-11.2 Story
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-11.3 Character: the enigmatic English patient
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-11.4 Mise-en-scène: setting
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-11.5 Narrative
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-11.6 Music
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-Unit 11 Questions for discussion
-Unit 11 单元测试
-Unit 11 The English Patient: Form and Narrative
-12.1 Signs and Symbols
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-12.2 Nationalism in The English Patient
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-12.3 Almasy as the misogynist and Katharine as a feminist
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-12.4 Kip as the Other
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-Unit 12 Questions for discussion
-Unit 12 单元测试