Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image to the audience?
Narrative is simply story-telling. As stated in our lecture slide, narrative consists of a series of events, actors, time and location (Woo, 2012). People have been narrating stories from time to time and the prove is that history has been made, and we know stories of them because it was written during a time of an important event, along with its people (characters/actors) and specific time and location. Everyone is capable of writing a story. As explained by Sikes and Gale (2006), "human beings are 'storying' creatures making sense of the world and the things that happen to us by constructing narratives to explain and interpret events both to ourselves and other people".
So why is narrative important when shaping a visual image?
According to Chatman (1978), narratives are made up of a story and a discourse. Without a story, it cannot be defined as a narrative, more over a visual image because as human.. we always want to know the story in chronological order. We wish to see and hear about what is being told. It is what makes up a narrative. For example:
This image tells a story. Simply: Lumpy Space Princess thinks she is going to be so hot. How do we know that this image tells a story? First, you can see the character herself; open-mouthed, gasping and eyes wide (though she has beady eyes but you can tell from her expression). Characters are paradigmatic and it is one of the elements in narrating. Imagine the image without a character and just its narrative, no one's going to know what's going to be "so frickin' hot" at all. However, it is not only the character that could actually make a story understandable. The story line makes up the syntagm. An image with just the character(s) included can be comprehensible but it could still be vague.
What is the image above trying to say? The expression of the girl above gives a message as if she is saying something like...
"Mmmhm, my Mummy's fingers look delish..."
"I love my Momma's nail polish. I can't wait to grow up so I could paint my nails with lots of colours!"
"I don't know whether that's a jam or corned beef my Mum's spreading on my bread"
Putting in texts makes the message even more clear.
Mieke Bal (1983) in the lecture slide explains that there are three parts to narrative structure: fabula, plot and texts. For example, narratives are used to make films.
This film uses a first-person pronoun. The producer of this story line was the speaking subject herself and the subject of speech as this film was based on what she had gone through year's ago. For those who has watched this movie before, you could see that this movie has all the stages in narrative structure. Events were shown in chronological order (from the time she departed the country for New York, to feeling depressed, attempting suicide, falling in love, last chaotic moment before hitting the iceberg, sinking of the ship, rescued). There were lots of characters involved and the film takes us back to 90 years ago until the present. Temporalities (flashbacks) were shown to make audiences understand what was going on. You could also tell that Titanic is such a heart-wrenching love-story-between-different-classes in which the main's character's mother was against. This touches on the stratification seen between the upper, middle and lower class. You could also see how they were treated in terms of what they do and where they spend their time on the ship. The discourse of that was something that viewers can relate to. Not only that, but this film has triggered million of viewers to display a little bit of a water work because of the hopes and dreams they wished they lived never happened. It shows how one a narrative is important.
Narratives are not only shown in advertisements and films but are also used in public relations, politics and also architecture. According to Huisman (2005) in Narrative and Media with Fulton, Murphet and Dunn, narratives in any medium and genre are ways of structuring and representing lived experience. We can experience visual image as much as we can experience in terms of language. Moreover, visual images allow in-depth experience by using concepts of language and also by using "semiotic analysis of signifying elements" and this is why narrative plays an important role in shaping visual images.
References:
Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse. United States: Cornell University Press
Huisman, R. (2005). Narrative concepts. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R.,
Murphet, J. and Dunn, A. (eds.), Narrative
and Media (pp. 11-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sikes, P., Gale, K. (2006). Narrative Approaches to Education Research. Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, retrieved November 17, 2012 from http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/narrative/narrativehome.htm
Woo, Chris. (2010). Analyzing Visual Communication Reader. Brunei Darussalam: Universiti Brunei Darussalam
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