Apply narrative theories to one of your coursework productions.


For my AS Coursework I constructed the opening of a film in the sub-genre of teen drama and researched a lot of films that were similar to our genre such as Wild Child, John Tucker Must Die, Mean Girls and She the Man. These all contributed to developing our knowledge on typical soundtrack, camera shots and storylines for teen drama.The storyline for our film was a young teenage girl and her two friends taking revenge on her cheating ex-boyfriend and was a comedy like Mean Girls unlike a dark humour such as Heathers. My group decided that our pre-title sequence should hook the audience into the narrative of the film in a number of ways.   

Roland Barthes discusses narrative in terms of a number of codes that are used to help to unravel the text for the viewer.  One of these is his Enigma code – the purpose of this is to keep the audience watching the story. In order to hook our audience we need to create a mystery that needs to be solved. Barthes also discussed a film in terms of Action codes.  In our film we included the main protagonist ripping the photo of her boyfriend, which is an indicator to how the revenge is going to take place. It also implies her anger towards the individual. 

Another action code we included was the science girl making an experiment, which again, indicated that the experiment might have something to do with the revenge.Semantically, we also included key codes to help our viewers understand our narrative.  For example, the reflective shot in the mirror and the cucumbers on the eyes which suggest that females are very conscious about their appearance and give a very generalised view.  We also included what Barthes describes as Referential codes, we used these in our film opening for example, the girls being in school are an obvious indication that they are in education. 

 Vladimir Propp is a theorist who discusses narrative purely in terms of character and actions.  Despite his research being about fairy tales, his work is helpful in decoding our sequence.  The protagonist in our film clearly meets Propp’s definition of a hero in that she departs on a search and has some sort of mystery or quest that needs to be solved, in our case the protagonist has a plan to get revenge on the ex-boyfriend and has to complete this plan with the help of her friends.  Furthermore, Propp came to the conclusion that all narratives can be boiled down to a number of functions initiated by these characters.  Our film follows the function of the villain being defeated, in this case the ex-boyfriend and the task is resolved in that they get revenge on him.

Todorov’s theories of narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline.  His theory split stories into 5 clear steps: equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the repair of it and then the new equilibrium.  Our title sequence plays with these codes in a non linear way in that the opening starts with a disruption when the boy cheats on the girl followed by the repair and then the equilibrium as they all end up living happily.

Finally Claude Levi-Strauss defines narrative as requiring the constant creation of conflict and opposition.  He summarised this in terms of visual opposition (such as light versus darkness) or conceptual (eg. Love versus hate, control versus panic).  We included a number of binary oppositions in our opening sequence, such as the main protagonist loving the boyfriend that when he cheats on her she turns to hate him but still loves him. We also had a few binary oppositions in terms of character personality for example, all the girls are different in terms of how they act for example, Hayley is very clever and 'geeky' whereas Tiffany is very popular and self centred.