Stories around the World in Film

Rationale

The majority of available films, both foreign and domestic, is constructed in narrative form.¹ Narrative can be defined as "the art and craft of constructing a story with a particular plot and point of view."² The key words in this definition are "constructing" and "particular," both of which imply the drive towards specific goals or viewpoints. Stories are manmade, not found in nature, so they must be built. In this construction process several key things happen. One is that stories acquire a particular voice because of who is doing the telling and a significant part of this voice is the perceived audience for the story. The linguistic sophistication of the narrative is pitched to the appropriate audience level so that the events of the narrative are clearly conveyed. For example, the initial audience for Dr. Seuss books is quite different from the audience for James Joyce novels. Each of these narratives imagines a different audience that requires different linguistic abilities and that is built into the story from the outset.

Along with the author pitching the story in a specific voice, s/he at the same time is using that voice to create a particular plot, a unique sequence of events, generally involving characters who go through some kind of conflict and achieve some kind of resolution to the conflict, though not always. The audience listens, reads, or views all of this because they want to find out what will happen to the characters in the story and they are hoping that it will be different from many of the other narratives they have already been told. The particular-ness of the story can be in the sequencing of events, which can be rather simplistic or extremely intricate and convoluted. As with the language of the story, the complexity of the plot is also constructed with the audience in mind.

The final key event in narrative construction, for our purposes, is the crafting of a point of view within the narrative itself. This is closely aligned with the linguistic voice of the story but differs in that this viewpoint exists within the narrative itself. Whether it is told in first, second, or third person, this is decision is made in an attempt to achieve particular effects. Within each of these possibilities are variations as well and a skillful author will take great care in choosing which to use. How different would Huckleberry Finn be if instead of being told from Huck's point of view we knew what each character was thinking? Or if we did not know what any of them thought, only what they did? Who is talking to us within the story will affect how we perceive the events of the narrative and will help the narrative achieve a sense of being unique or particular.

Taking into account just these three keys begins to reveal that much that goes into narrative construction is done with the audience in mind. Storytellers strive to make their stories stand out and that building process leads us to consider the particularity, the uniqueness of the narrative plot and point of view. What is this story about? Who is telling this story? The worst thing a storyteller can hear is that the listener has already heard that one. Thus new stories are continually sought out or old ones re-told but constructed differently so that the audience will remain and listen.

Narratives vary widely in many of their characteristics but overwhelmingly, the goal of all narratives is to create an effect in the reader/viewer. This goal could be to elicit an emotional response, to teach, to warn, to entertain, or to do any number of things but they are seldom crafted just to exist for themselves. The more I taught AP English Language and Film, the more I could not help but notice the similarities between narrative construction and argument. Both are designed to elicit a response and in the best ones everything in them is working towards getting something specific across to the reader/viewer. Slowly I have found myself thinking of narrative in rhetorical terms. Literary texts, films, and arguments are arranged in a very specific order, are delivered in a specific style, and are striving to deliver specific results. In this sense then, they are all functioning in a rhetorical fashion and thus I began looking for similarities in the way we make meaning out them.³ It was this quest that eventually developed into the technique that comprises this unit, which I feel can be used universally. Thus my goal for this unit is to give the fellow AP English and/or film teacher a method for examining texts — be they film, prose fiction, or argument - that can be used again and again as well as freely modified. While it would not make all students into budding scholars instantly, I feel that through repeated use it will begin to make them more sophisticated readers and, hopefully, writers of deeper substance.⁴

In film studies there exists an analysis technique that is called "narrative segmentation." In this process, an attempt is made to divide the film into its narrative parts or components.⁵ One basic way to analyze the meaning of a narrative text — visual or written — is to break it into its component parts and examine the relationships between them. Segmentation gives us a means to do this and helps us understand the connections from micro units to macro units. By making these connections apparent and studying the relationships from segment to segment and then overall, one can begin to see that it is these relationships that attempt to control our understanding of and responses to the text. Using segmentation to dissect a text is the main teaching strategy of my unit.

Segmentation works because the students themselves are the ones performing the slow unraveling of the text, not necessarily the teacher. They begin to take responsibility for textual interpretation and understanding. When I have done this in my classroom, it places me immediately in more of an advisor role, shifting the class to a student-centered classroom and away from a teacher-centered classroom. When I am coaching them from the sidelines during a discussion of the components of a text, it slowly becomes apparent to them that they are the ones making the knowledge, making the text mean. The long-range goal of this practice is to then help them take ownership of this skill so that they will be able to perform throughout the year. Hopefully by revisiting this practice throughout the year they become so proficient at it that they can perform a mini-version of it on the AP exam.

The best way to teach students to segment a text is with film. Film is something that the students are immediately familiar with and tends to elicit a larger positive response than an assigned story/poem/novel. Students also regard themselves as equals in the realm of film interpretation. They expect others (English teachers, for example) to have deeper interpretations of literary texts but concerning film, in part because it is so ubiquitous, they do not see any one interpretation as being more sophisticated then another. By the time they reach eleventh and twelfth grade, many students have already imposed on themselves a limit on their abilities to understand a literary text. These limits work to hinder student growth because some students will have convinced themselves that they just "don't get" novels, poems, etc. . . and in doing so they have set limits on their abilities that in turn have an indirect effect on the classroom. Fewer students contributing means fewer minds being put together to build comprehension skills. By starting with a film, hopefully this "tune-out" will be prevented.