Narrative structure - Cronology

Part 1: (Beginning)

Cinderella moves to her stepmother’s house as her mother dies.

They treat her like a maid.

She was suffering

Evil stepsisters.

The prince needs a princess so they make a dance

Part 2: (Middle-Liminal)

Cinderella isn’t allowed to go to the dance

She cries for this and the fairy god mother appears and gives her a dress and a car to go to the dance.

She can stay beyond 12 because afterwards the magic dies.

She forgets about time and she runs home 1 minute early and she forgets her glass shoe.

The prince stays with the glass shoe.

Liminal point: from being a maid poor girl to a beautiful princess, and then from a princess to a maid again at the deadline established by the fairy godmother.

Part 3: (Ending)

The prince says that he will only marry the princess he met in the dance and which he has the glass shoe.

He tries the shoe to all the girls in the dance. The stepsisters try the shoe and it doesn’t fit, afterwards Cinderella tries it and it fits.

Cinderella marries the prince.

Happy ending <3

Classic structure for the way a story is told on a film?

Beginning, middle, end.

What is the traditional system by which the main events in a film are ordered?

Chronological order

What other terms can we use to describe the pattern or order?

Linear fashion

Narrative chronology:

How are events ordered in the early scenes of “Psycho”?

Hotel – problem established (cause): she don’t have money to marry

Office à has the money and she has to take it to the bank

Her house à she didn’t went to the bank and she is steeling the money (effect)

Are all films ordered in this way?

Not necessarily all movies. Sometimes the movies are done as flashbacks, although they always have a beginning, middle and end.

Examples:

Momentum

Slam dog millionaire

Kill Bill

Thirteen

English patient

Titanic

Pulp fiction

Why do you think a director would choose the approach to the ordering of events?

Do it predictable.

Create interest, tension.

To get some of the exiting things to increase their importance.

To put questions in the audience’s mind to create predictions, suspense, and a wide variety of feelings.

Pulp fiction:

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Actor: John Travolta

Second biggest movie done by the director

1994

What is the chronology in Pulp Fiction (1994)

Fabula is the chronological structure in which the film is constructed

Cronology order

4.A)

2. A)

5.

1

6.

2b

3

4b

Is this purely random? Draw a timeline

How does the change in the chronological order of events affect the film’s cause/effect logic?

There is a breaking between cause and effect. In some scenes we see just causes and in others just effect, normally is cause and then effect. It doesn’t follows a chronological effect.

Effect in the audience?

Engagement

Curiosity

Interest

Don’t understand

Confusing

The narrative ordering of a film pilot (not its chronology) is known as the sujet (the ordering of the telling of the story)

Fabula and sujet

- So the fabula is the raw material of a story in chronological order

- The sujet is the way a story is then organized by the director on film

So how would you describe the sujet of Pulp Fiction?

Unusual, complex, pattern?

What impact does the complexity of its sujet have on the audience?