The readings that were assigned to us this week brought me to a concept that I have seen many times before but haven’t really pondered over, nor truly realized the potential of; the types of narrative discourse used in movies.

In the Chatman reading “What Novels Can Do”, he describes on page 122 line 10 that “realistic narratives, the time of the story is fixed, following the ordinary course of a life: a person is born, grows from childhood to maturity and old age, and then dies” this, in my opinion, is the most common way of a film playing out. The perfect example of this type of narrative discourse is the 2014 film “Boyhood” which follows the life of a boy from the youthful age of 6 to his later teenage years of 18. Also more interesting because the film took 12 years to film as the film literally followed the “course” of the boys “life”.

However, as Chatman continues in later paragraphs, narrative discourse can have a completely different “time order” as it could “start with the person’s deathbed, then ‘flashback’ to childhood; or it may start with childhood, ‘flashforward’ to death, then end with adult life” (page 122 line 24). A perfect example of this is Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” where we start with an elderly man visiting a war cemetery who collapses in painstaking grief at the foot of a grave. This scene is then followed by a flashback to the D-Day landings at Omaha beach, where the movie in a “realistic” discourse would start, considering the subject of the movie is saving a soldier with the last name Ryan.

Furthermore, you could go as far as arguing that Saving Private Ryan does go further in fitting Chatman’s theories, especially “double time structuring… the time of the histoire(“story-time”) with the time of the presen- tation of those events in the text,” (page 122 line 5). This could fit Saving Private Ryan because the “time of the histoire” could be labelled as the quest to save Private Ryan and the “time of the presen- tation of those events” could be the real-life scenarios such as World War 2 and the Omaha beach landings of D-Day.

My question is: For the most part, which leads to a more entertaining and dramatic movie? Both have their own attributes and both can in their own ways develop a very entertaining movie.

The excitement in the narrative structure of films like “Boyhood” comes with the anticipation of what is to come next in the story because the audience is experiencing the narrative like they are walking side by side with the characters as the scenes unfold before them. As seen in “Boyhood” it is like we are growing up with the main character (Mason) and participating in his life.

On the other hand, structures like “Saving Private Ryan” leave the audience guessing by revelling the end and then reverting back to how the characters ended up in that last scene.

 

In my opinion I prefer the format that movies like “Saving Private Ryan” takes. From my own experience of watching this movie the layout mislead me incredibly. I believed that the old man we saw at the start was Tom Hanks’ character Captain John Miller, who maybe failed his mission of “Saving Private Ryan” which would explain his distress at the grave of a soldier (Private Ryan maybe? So I thought). This was supported by the scene that followed which was Captain Miller about to storm the beach.

The narrative then took a “realistic discourse” through the course of the movie by following the characters in the quest to save Ryan till the ending scene, which sees Private Ryan standing over Captain Miller as he dies and then flashes forward again to the ceremony scene where he is standing in the same fashion over the grave of (as we now know) Captain Miller.

Therefore from a personal point of view this layout of narrative was more misleading and therefore unexpected which in turn made it more entertaining for me.