Screen Narrative Research Articles

Reclaiming the Streets: Investigating Female Experience of Cinematic Urban Violence

The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-Go- Lucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion instead display the city as a space of potential female sexual, social, and spatial emancipation—most notably achieved through employing the comedic genre to express the potentially subversive power of comedy in overthrowing gender and social hierarchies. My primary focus will remain on the narrative techniques that these texts employ to rewrite what I refer to as the “fear script” and to dismantle motifs of gendered victimhood.

Aspiring to the Creative Class: Reality Television and the Role of the Mentor

Aspiring to the Creative Class: Reality Television and the Role of the Mentor

Book Review: Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives

Book Review: Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives

Cinema and Cyberphobia: Internet Tropes in Film and Television

Despite the widespread embrace of the Internet and the second nature way we each turn to Google for information, to social media to see our friends, to netporn and Netflix for recreation, film and television tells a very different story. On screen, a character dating online, gaming online or shopping online, invariably serves as a clue that they’re somewhat troubled: they may be a socially excluded nerd at one end of the spectrum, through to being a paedophile or homicidal maniac seeking prey at the other. On screen, the Internet is frequently presented as a clue, a risk factor and a rationale for a character’s deviance or danger. While the Internet has come to play a significant role in screen narratives, an undercurrent of many depictions – in varying degrees of fervour – is that the Web is complicated, elusive and potentially even hazardous. This paper draws from research conducted for my book Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators: Film, TV, and Internet Stereotypes (Rosewarne, 2016). While that volume provided an analysis of the denizens of the Internet through the examination of over 500 film and television examples – profiling screen stereotypes such as netgeeks, neckbeards, and netaddicts – this paper focuses on some of the recurring themes in portrayals of the Internet, shedding light on the how, and perhaps most importantly why, the fear of the technology is so common. This paper presents a series of themes used to frame the Internet as negative on screen including dehumanisation, the Internet as a badlands, the Web as possessing inherent vulnerabilities and the cyberbogeyman.

Cinema and Cyberphobia: Internet Tropes in Film and Television

Despite the widespread embrace of the Internet and the second nature way we each turn to Google for information, to social media to see our friends, to netporn and Netflix for recreation, film and television tells a very different story. On screen, a character dating online, gaming online or shopping online, invariably serves as a clue that they’re somewhat troubled: they may be a socially excluded nerd at one end of the spectrum, through to being a paedophile or homicidal maniac seeking prey at the other. On screen, the Internet is frequently presented as a clue, a risk factor and a rationale for a character’s deviance or danger. While the Internet has come to play a significant role in screen narratives, an undercurrent of many depictions – in varying degrees of fervour – is that the Web is complicated, elusive and potentially even hazardous. This paper draws from research conducted for my book Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators: Film, TV, and Internet Stereotypes (Rosewarne, 2016). While that volume provided an analysis of the denizens of the Internet through the examination of over 500 film and television examples – profiling screen stereotypes such as netgeeks, neckbeards, and netaddicts – this paper focuses on some of the recurring themes in portrayals of the Internet, shedding light on the how, and perhaps most importantly why, the fear of the technology is so common. This paper presents a series of themes used to frame the Internet as negative on screen including dehumanisation, the Internet as a badlands, the Web as possessing inherent vulnerabilities and the cyberbogeyman.

Storytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narratives

Storytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narratives

Conquer or Connect: Power, Patterns, and the Gendered Narrative

years ago i was se ated in a darkened theater trying to watch a film. All The Pretty Horses (2000) was pretty enough, with good production values and appealing music by Marty Stuart. But not only did the narrative fail to engage me, the structure and content of the screenplay positively pushed me away and al- lowed enough space for my mind to analyze or intellectualize the distance I felt. About halfway into the film, it occurred to me that by examin- ing the interplay between the main character (played by Matt Damon) and his love interest (played by Penelope Cruz), I had come to a more concrete language for explaining some- thing arising from screenplays that bothers me in many finished films. Not only is Damon's character launched on the commonly depicted hero's journey or quest, but his story also is really one of multiple conquests-break the horses, get the girl, beat the (admittedly unfair) system. His success in every case is temporary and contrasts vividly with the decisions made by the beautiful, rich woman who sleeps with him and says she loves him but ultimately chooses to maintain the connection she has with her powerful and close-knit Mexican family rather than strike out on her own with a penni- less drifter from north of the border. Within the context of the film, her choice is presented as somehow wrong, but a larger question remains: why should a choice to connect rather than to conquer be presented as wrong? I realized while sitting in the theater that the stories of my own life, not to mention the stories I re- spond to onscreen, are the underrepresented and underexplored narratives of connection, stories I believe are feminine in form.It is important to look critically at the impli- cations of various theories of narrative as well as the ideologies contained in the classical narrative structure rearticulated by popular screenwriting gurus such as Syd Field, Linda Seger, Richard Walter, Robert McKee, and Blake Snyder.1 By contrasting themes of conquest and connection in film, this article explores the im- plications of gender and narrative that are first expressed in screenplay. Simply put, stories told in a conventional, masculine form are gen- erally linear, hero-driven tales about conquest, whereas stories told with a more circular and sometimes collective feminine structure are often about overcoming obstacles in order to find connection. That connection may be inter- nal, may involve other individuals or groups, or may even relate to larger communities. I do not mean this in an essentialist or reductive sense; men might tell some stories with a feminine structure, and women working in commercial Hollywood most often tell conventionally mas- culine stories. I contend that there are other ways-good and useful ways that transcend the dominant neo-Aristotelian-to approach the screen narrative, and the structures I suggest reflect the lived experience of women. Exam- ples of how a feminine narrative structure looks in include such films as Strangers in Good Company (1990), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Blue (1993), The Piano (1993), Anto- nia's Line (1995), and more recently, I Am Love (2009). My starting place in exploring gender and narrative is an early essay by feminist liter- ary theorist Josephine Donovan called Toward a Women's Poetics.2 In this essay, Donovan argues that [t]o understand women's art one must have a knowledge of women's experi- ence and practice (99), and she delineates six structural conditions that she argues have traditionally shaped women's experience. I fol- low those categories of experience in the body of this article and tease out implications of the relevant patterns and power relationships as they apply to gendered narrative in the screen- play form. Once again, I want to make clear that I am talking about broad patterns and am not implying that Donovan's conditions represent the experience of all women or that feminine narrative structures are not available to men who find them meaningful. …

Contemporary Screen Narratives

The one-day conference entitled “Contemporary Screen Narratives”, with its enticing plural, took place on May 17 at the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham (UK) – a Department chaired by Professor Roberta Pearson. The conference, organized by Anthony Smith, featured an exciting mix of presentations from current PhD candidates, emerging scholars and well-established authorities, mostly from UK institutions – with the addition of representatives from Turkey, Sp...

Back to the future: Multi-image screen narrative in a digital age

ABSTRACTWe only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice […] We never look at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.(Berger 1983: 1)This statement denotes our searching nature, claiming that as viewers we are eager to make sense of what we see, constructing connections across our vision, piecing together fragments of information in search of meaning. We have a central vision that we use to focus on main events and a peripheral one that allows us to be drawn to other areas of interest. Today, in everyday life, there is a constant battle for our peripheral vision, we are continually distracted by a range of moving images. Each time we enter a public space or switch on our computer screens, advertisers have found a way to push their products on us, and now a plethora of moving images have become an accepted part of our experience. This article attempts to explore the aesthetics of this recent phenomenon of multi-imaging to see if there is a historical context in relation to storytelling and to find out what can be learnt from the past in order to help build strategies for creating narratives of the future. I examine a range of visual examples and review the technical and cultural aspects of stories that have been told using more than one image and attempt to draw comparisons. Starting with the visual storytelling of fourteenth century diptych religious paintings, I go on to look at the impact of perspective, then early film form, comparing its arrival to recent developments in digital technology, discuss Abel Gance's cinematic epic Napoleon (1927) and its relation to Russian montage. The avant-garde, Expanded Cinema, and internet art is also examined. The context of my work is practice as research and I discuss this in relation to the conception, writing, directing, editing and exhibition of my film Writ in Water (2009), a narrative film designed for three-screen presentation in a cinematic context.

Surveillance Cinema: Narrative between Technology and Politics

Taking as a starting point the recent surge in film and television narratives constructed around and by surveillance technologies, this essay offers a historical and theoretical reexamination of the manner in which screen narrative has organized political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. The essay demonstrates that even when films are focused on insistently visual deployments of surveillance technologies, the narrative construction around those technologies suggests highly complex dynamics—dynamics that neither psychoanalytic conceptions of voyeurism nor Foucault’s discourse on Bentham’s panopticon can entirely account for. A visual orientation has made it these approaches which have, within the realm of cinema studies, overwhelming served to explain the formations and functions of a variety of disparate surveillance-themed narratives. A more phenomenological reading of the relations between technology and narrative, as well as a more dynamic intersection with political philosophy as is represented in the growing field of surveillance studies, allows us to see how what this essay calls “surveillance cinema” serves to consolidate the stakes of surveillance technologies and practices with greater attention to historical and structural specificity.

From three acts to three screens: the significance of the role of writing in a new media film project

This article will discuss the writing and editing of a short film called Writ in Water, a project specifically designed for three-screen projection. I will explore the influences of the process of writing for multi-image drama by considering Lev Manovich's notion of narrative as database, Gene Youngblood's view of syncretism and synaesthetics and Robert McKee's approach to three-act structure in relation to story, inciting incident, character development and narrative timeline. I will also outline the influence of Aristotle on this new media drama triptych and, finally, discuss scriptwriting as a changing component in relation to digital technology. The continuing significance of the script as blueprint will be explored and how classic story structure and use of new technology work together to inform the final work. This article aims to reflect on the acts and the actions of narrative creation using the classic tropes of screenwriting and its influences, and also recognize the importance of process in contributing to new knowledge in the area of multi-image screen narrative. A full appreciation of an artwork includes an understanding of the extent to which it is a product and reflection of the technologies used in its making (Shaw and Weibel 2003: 198).

Vitagraphic Time

Two screen narratives from 2004 take up autobio/graphic techniques of visual mediation from opposite sides of a division suggested long ago by Gilles Deleuze between "European humanism" and "American science fiction." Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, about a Spanish film director confronted with a script that implicates his own erotic past, carries the stylistic possibilities of the Deleuzian "time-image" to new digitally implemented extremes in the mode of elegiac melodrama. By contrast, Omar Naim's futurist fable The Final Cut, about a digital implant that records one's entire life and then requires a "cutter" to edit it down for the funeral rites of "rememory," explores a dystopian reduction of human temporality to mere cybernetic storage. In response to such autobiographical extremes, an approach through "narratography" is able to chart the tracings of memory along the grain of the cinematographic and digitized image—and their ironic amalgams—in both films.

Television’s Glocal Advertising in Veridical Product Narrative: A SE Asian Reception Study of Consumer Alignment/Alienation

Drawing on post‐Marxist screen reception studies in Malaysia, our article establishes a theoretical framework enabling analysis of consumer identification with/cultural distancing from television advertising and its aesthetics. We develop a hermeneutic model of audience response to audio‐visual text as ludic or play‐like in cognitively pursuing a meaning for veridical (mediated yet transparently accessible) marketing narrative sketches of everyday life transcended. Illustrating and illuminating this thesis, we report on a small SE Asian university research project whose participants articulate written reactions to two televised advertisements displaying transcultural product morphing (or glocal goods). Customer identification with consumers shown in television marketing is argued to be fundamentally hermeneutic. Brought into focus through analysis, that is, customer/consumer alignment is conceptual, conscious, and cultural where both project (expect and establish) a screen narrative shared epistemologically (as interpretative knowledge) and ontologically (as involving their activity). The reader’s propositional identification with a text’s perceived normative statement is enabled. On the other hand, discourses of consumer alienation emerge in response to advertisements inappropriately addressing audience horizons of expectation.

Computers with Color Monitors: Disembodied Black Screen Images 1988-96

Computers with Color Monitors: Disembodied Black Screen Images 1988–1996 Martin Kevorkian* (bio) In the farewell panels of Outland, a particular facet of white imagination achieves a realized eschatology. Oliver Wendell Jones, the black child famous for his precocious use of his personal computer, makes his final exit from the Sunday newspapers (2/19/95; see fig. 1) with a “microprocessor in ear” and a “color monitor in face.” Indeed, [End Page 283] as a review of depictions of digitality in recent popular films will reveal, images of computer operators are carefully monitored for facial color. In the bizarre drawing of Jones, a piece of cultural logic simply reaches its conclusion: the black body itself becomes a personal computer. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Opus appears to be somewhat alarmed at the cyborgian transformation of Oliver Wendell Jones, who explains his microprocessed state in the farewell panels of the comic strip Outland. © Berkeley Breathed The impulse that places black faces in front of flickering, black computer screens is nowhere more visible than at the movies. For the last decade, black techno-wizards (usually male) have consistently populated the most profitable Hollywood action blockbusters. All-time heavyweight box-office champs like Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Mission: Impossible (1996) all furnish prime examples of this black screen phenomenon. 1 A reading of key characters and scenes from these and other popular films—written, produced, and directed by whites—will attempt to unpack what is at stake in this highly selective depiction of the human/digital interface. Outland’s Opus provides a hint: his reaction to Oliver’s cyborgian transformation is one of obvious discomfort and a nostalgia for physical presence. In later panels, he gradually edges away almost out of the frame, and while Oliver attempts to reassure him about the virtues of Internet access, Opus mutters “I’m not feeling too connected” and “you can’t hug in cyberspace.” Opus does not wish to participate in the virtual interaction Oliver proffers; when Oliver extends a diskette and instructs Opus that “you have to load me,” Opus demurs in cowering horror. Such encounters with new technology have been clearly diagnosed in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological analysis: “All surface, electronic space cannot be inhabited. It denies or prosthetically transforms the spectator’s physical body.” 2 Katherine Hayles similarly notes how certain “materialities of informatics” can “create the bodily impression of immateriality.” 3 Sobchack concludes her essay with a poignant description of the threat of the digital embrace: “Devaluing the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world, electronic presence suggests that we are all in imminent danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine.” 4 We may all be in danger, but some whites might wish to displace that fear, at least in their escapist fictions, onto an available other. Or to particularize the compulsion further, whites who fear the devaluation of their own physically lived bodies might especially wish such immaterialization upon those others whose bodies they most fear. The manifest testimony [End Page 284] of recent movies, brought into conjunction with observations of cyberphobia, suggests a first axiom: If digital small screen technology tends to disembody the subject, then in whites’ big screen narratives, the black male becomes the preferred object of this disembodiment. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison notes the strongly nurtured prejudice against analyzing the racial marking of cultural roles: “To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference . . . every well-bred instinct argues against noticing.” 5 Perhaps those instincts argue even louder when there are no doubt some good intentions behind the portrayals at hand. Yet it is worth a second look to test the reach of Morrison’s suspicions regarding the “sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.” 6 In his preface to James Snead’s posthumously published White Screens/Black Images, Cornel West calls for an analysis of film beyond a “narrow political seeking out of positive or negative black images.” 7 He particularly wishes Snead were around to make sense of “the contemporary preoccupation with black images—as...

Difficult viewing: The pleasures of complex screen narratives

This article explores viewing difficulty, the condition in which a screen text poses confusing or oblique cues that impede the viewer's construction of its narrative. Significant operations of the viewing process, often overlooked because they are automatic, become fore grounded when the viewer is confronted with narrative difficulty. An analysis of the mechanisms of A Very British Coup, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons demonstrates how complex screen narratives especially—and to some degree all screen narratives—ask viewers to enter into and take pleasure from an active and involved process of sense‐making.