THEORY - Conventions

NARRATIVE THEORY (CONVENTIONS)

When untangling a narrative to find it's meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. They include: 

• Genre
• Character
• Form
• Time

We also are encouraged to use our of knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. Time is something that we understand as a convention - that narratives do not take place in real time  but may telescope out (slow motion etc). "The time of the thing told and the time of the telling" - Christian Metz. 

It is only because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions. A narrative is in it's most basic sense of a series of events however to construct a meaning from the narrative those events must be linked. 

TIME

As we watch a film we try to put the events in chronological order.
 - Temporal Order-
This is when the plot doesnt always show us events in a strict chronological order. For example, sometimes we use techniques like flashback to show was what happened in the past (or sometimes a flashforward to what might happen in the future).  The narrative can also be presented in parallel terms (two people getting ready at the same time but show in split screens).

NARRATIVE - TIME AND SPACE 
Narrative shapes material in terms of space and time - it defines where things take place, when the take place, how quickly they take place. Narrative has an immense ability to manipulate our awareness of time and place. (flashbacks etc).

NARRATIVE MODES 
- THE NARRATIVE OF EVENTS 
A hero shoot an enemy agent, dives into a lake, triggers a remote control device which will destroy the enemy submarine.
- THE NARRATIVE OF DRAMA
The heroine has a tense argument with the hero and decides he was never her type and she is going to leave. Nothing has really happened in terms of events but a lot has happened dramatically.

USING NARRATIVE TO BUILD SUSPENSE


- ALLAN CAMERON - Modular Narratives - 

Anachronic  - Modified flashbacks/forwards
                           - no clear dominance between narrative threads

Forking path  - alternative versions of the story
                             - outcomes that might result from slight changes

Episodic - collection of stories joined by a common theme

Split Screen - spatial rather than temporal lines
                           - split the screen showing multiple things happening at the one time 

- BARTHES' CODE -

"a galaxy of signifiers , not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances; none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilises extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language...."

Roland Barthes was a Seminotics professor in the 1950s/60s who got paid to spend all day unravelling bits of text and writing about the process. He came to the conclusion that texts can be either 'open' (unravelled in many different way) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).

Barthes code is one where that he phrases as "a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours". Once unravelled , we can discover multiple potential meanings. We can start by looking at the narrative from one main viewpoint. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle by pulling out a different thread and see an entirely different meaning. 

He decided that the threads you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called Narrative Codes and are categorised in 5 different ways : 

1. Action/Proairetic Code
2. Enigma Code
3. Symbols & Signs
4. Points of Cultural Reference
5. Simple description/reproduction