Narrative means a story that has a beginning middle and end, in moving images (such as music videos) the narrative can either tell the same thing as the lyrics/words or it can tell a completely different story through the moving images. Narratives don’t have to be in chronological order and make sense, they can go back and forth between shots and show flashbacks and flashforward’s.

There are 5 main narrative theorists: Todorov proposed that there was an equilibrium, disruption that then balances to make a new equilibrium. Freytag proposed that you can draw your narrative (almost like a rollercoaster). Propp proposed that each story has a set of stock characters eg the villain and the hero. Levi-Strauss proposed that narratives play out binary opposition. Chatman proposed that everything in a narrative works together so if you take one thing out then the story wouldn’t work / play out the same.

You can use Todorov’s theory to analyse narrative in music videos because the narratives in music videos always have a conflict and a resolution. For example in common’s letter to the free (soundtrack to the 13^th about the abolishment of slavery) The black square is a metaphor showing how the black community is trapped in an ideology that is widely believed by the majority of white Americans, at the end of the video the solution is the square being outside and not being trapped in that building any more. Freytag’s theory can be used to analyse Ghost town, for example you can draw where there’s a climax in the piece, eg when you see everyone in the car cramped together.

Another example to use to describe narrative theory is the film Momento, you can use freytag’s theory to analyse this film, you can say that you can draw Momento as a hair pin (present and past), parallel to each other, so the narrative is fragmented switching between the 2 time frames, making a very confusing story for the audience. The film starts with the ending almost like a circular narrative, however, part of the story is behind the hair pin shape not being shown, and the 2 parallels come together at the end showing the connection between the two, leaving the audience to fill in the the gaps and take what they have found out to be the alleged ‘truth’ and make their own ending in their head for what makes sense to them.

To conclude ideas about narrative are useful in analysing music videos because you can see why a video was carried out in a certain way and why it was made how it was made, you can see how they put it together so it follows a story rather than just looking like a lot of shots just pieced together. It’s important for moving image to tell a story and be smooth unless the purpose is to look crazy and out of place to get the audience thinking about why it was done like that.

• what life is like now
• linked to media, film ,communication studies etc…
• memento – complicated and fragmentary set of inter-relationships
• momento – pastiche (detective story), postmodernism does this as a new version so it’s different to similar stories
• preoccupation with visual style
• loss of metanarrative (we don’t know the full story of leonard/momento)
• momento – leonard isn’t able to distinguish fiction form reality

• narratives are made of many things : sound,image,text,etc…
• follow a theme
• usually linear + sequential
• narratives tell stories through linear communication

MOMENTO

• there isn’t a clear narrative
• repeats itself
• narrative is fragmented – just like momento with Leonard’s condition
• inconsistent narrative (jumps from present to future)

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSSE

• narrative based on binary opposition
• good vs evil
• key themes create a set of messages which the audience can decode and understand
• audience can make judgments about characters

ELISION AND ELLIPSIS

• some elements are missing
• not linear, not real time
• flashbacks and flash forwards

• parallel / simultaneous narrative
• makes audience fill in the gaps (E and E)

• dramatic irony (telling audience something characters don’t know)
• foreshadowing
• use of light and shade (contrast)

BARTHES

• proairetic code – action, movenment
• hermenuetic code – reflection, dialogue, character development
• enigma code – way intrigue ideas are raised

Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge, life, being, art, technology, culture, sociology, philosophy, politics and history that is REFERENTIAL – in that it often refers to and often copies other things in order to understand itself.

pastiche – imitates something from someone else

parody – mimics something with irony

Bricolage – created with a a diverse range of things

Metanarrative – idea of storytelling, focusing on a point

Simulacrum – representation of something or someone

Conumerist Society – a lot of time and effort put into it and resources

Fragmentary Identities – different identities for different people/settings

Implosion – sudden failure of a business

cultural appropriation – elements of a culture is introduced to another culture

Reflexivity – relationship between cause and effect

Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play – people can act like or look like more than one gender

• their preoccupation with visual style (roy shuker)

BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237). Similarly, INTERTEXTUALITY is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs

Surface and style over substance

• surfaces and style become the most important defining features 

Richard Hoggart

• neighborhood lives
• an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near

POSTMODERNISM CULTURE

• focused on consumption
• more displaces (not living in a community)

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

• fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighborhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction.
• creates alienated individuals

 Jean Baudrillard

• implosion of society

Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson

• loss of meta narrative
• crisis in historicity

hyper reality is a simulation (it’s real but not real eg copies of something)

“I’ve always said you can’t understand the world without the media nor the media without the world” (Professor Natalie Fenton, quoted in Fake news vs Media Studies J. McDougall p.17 2019, Palgrave)

PAUL GILROY

• double consciousness derived from W.E.B Dubois
• eg black british / american (you’re more than one thing so have to try to act as both to fit in and not be judged)

Orientalism

The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism

‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism‘
EDWARD SAID

• eastern (orient) people couldn’t represent themselves (so represented from the west eg white people)

creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘

‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’

V.G. KIERNAN

JAQUES LACAN

• the other, we don’t ever see ourselves only reflections
• The Other, a mirror by which a reflection of the self can be measured out and examined.
• first time a baby sees itself in a mirror
• mirror stage
• forms identity (who we are)

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

• ideological state apparatus (ISA)
• ‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.

FRANTZ FANON

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’

ANTONIO GRAMSCI – Hegemony

• how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others
• (hegemonic struggle) a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT
• ‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light
• people can reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity
• hegemony = leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others.

PAUL GILROY

• Double Consciousness ( ‘cultural polyvalency’ )
• There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (cultural politics of race and nation, 1987)

SYSTEMATIC SOCIETAL SEXISM

The President of the United States, talks and thinks about women. This would be known as MISOGYNY This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women, or put simply: SEXISM, a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society, otherwise known as PATRIARCHY

SEXISM

• level of institution (institutional)
• individual

WAVES OF FEMINISM

• suffragettes FIRST WAVE
• 1960s Barry makes the point that although the women’s movement was not the start of feminism, ‘the feminist literary criticism of today is the product of the women’s movement of the 1960’s’ . In other words, the issue of women’s inequality has a history that pre-dates the 1960’s, see for examples: Mary Wollstonecraft, (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Women; Virginia Woolf(1929) A room of one’s own; Simone de Beauvoir(1949) The Second Sex.

• 1970s SECOND WAVE,
• This period is often termed second wave feminism – after the first wave of feminism, which was galvanised by organisations such as, the British Women’s Suffrage Committee (1867), the International Council of Women (1888), the The International Alliance of Women (1904), and so on who, in early part of the 20th Century, worked to get women the right to vote.

• 1990’s THIRD WAVE
• coined by Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movement of the 1960’s and ’70’s, challenging and recontextualising some of the definitions of femininity that grew out of that earlier period. In particular, the third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class,
• religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism. an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

• FORTH WAVE
• also looked to explore these contradictary arguments and further sought to recognise and use the emancipatory tools of new social platforms to connect, share and develop new perspectives, experiences and responses to oppression, ‘tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online‘ (Cochrane, 2013). As such, from the radical stance of #MeToo to the Free the Nipple campaign, which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported (which may encourage you to re-evaluate your initial reading of her video Wrecking Ball above), the use of new media technologies has been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of critical thinking.
• Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’

LAURA MULVEY

• Second wave feminist
• inspired by Freud
• ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘
• the male gaze
• ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’
• women are objectified and sexualised
• scopophilia – pleasure of looking
• vouyerism – looking is sexualised
• fetishism – focus on one thing over another usually of a sexual nature
• dehumanises

JEAN KILBOURNE

• Second wave feminist
• In the media education foundation
• TED TALK – ‘the dangerous ways ads see women’
• secretary, waitress
• “babies can recognise logos from 6 months”
• BOOKS – Deadly persuasion (1999) – “if you want to get into people’s wallets first you have to get into their lives” (exploitation of human desires) creates a “toxic culture environment”
• So sexy so soon (2008) – “girls are encouraged to objectify themselves”
• Can’t buy my love (2012)

JACK LE CAN

• also inspired by Freud
• you aren’t born with consciousness
• mirror stage – moment when we recognise who we are (recognise they have consciousness)
• we only know the other, we can’t see ourselves, only see a reflection

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

INTERSECTIONALITY

more focus on individual agency (more power to individuals)

• narrative is to do with time
• beginning middle end
• linear or non linear or sequential or non sequential
• can alternate space in an unnatural way
• can organise or disorganise space
• there’s a theme that links it all together
• narrative (overall structure), story (theme), plot (structure of events)

TODOROV

• bulgarian, cultural theorist
• equilibrium, disruption, new equilibrium
• tri part type narrative structure

GUSTAV FREYTAG

• you can draw the narrative of a moving image
• eg like a roller coaster, there’s a climax then it slowly levels out

VLADIMIR PROPP

• similarities in similar media products (stock characters), perform stock functions
• preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return, recognition

CALUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

• we never know what is, we only know what isn’t
• narratives play out binary opposition

SEYMOUR CHATMAN

• if you take something out, the story doesn’t work
• everything works together to create a story

• Pastiche – artistic work that that imitates the style of another artist, or period
• Bricolage – constructed from a diverse range of things
• Intertextuality – relationship between texts
• Implosion – something (eg product/company) collapsing inwards / sudden failure
• cultural appropriation – unacknowledged adoption of ideas from someone or a society