interesting story/literary structures

Nuno Dias said:
Any film with 'less' story, I ask: what's the point? Waste people's time? Waste your investor's money? If you don't want to tell a story, what is it that you want in a movie?
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A movie can also be a work of beauty. To be a story it needs certain elements but to be a movie, really it just has to consist of projected light and move. Perhaps a third requirement is a formal screen because I don't know if video installation art should qualify since it is trying to create a 'space' rather than a framed viewing experience (you immerse yourself in a movie, you don't inhabit it). To be a good movie it just needs to hold your attention. A movie also does not need to make money if it is art. It is difficult however to produce a movie that will hold attention over a feature length but many shorts, particularly animation will employ a purely visceral aesthetic. As long as you keep the viewer curious as to what might happen next they will watch.


As far as story-less films go there are obviously Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), follow-ons from Koyaanisqatsi.

There was one european film I saw a while ago that was less out of the mold of these 'documentary' style suggestions featuring carefully constructed and choreographed scenes of visceral and disturbing beauty. I thought it might have been Lars von Trier but I can't find a title in his filmography that rings a bell. As I recall one of the key images in the trailer was of a heavily made up statuesque man, on a pillar and wrapped in a billowing red sheet. It was quite controversial, probably due to sexually explicit material. Critics were unusually passionate and heavily divided, most hating it.

On a more family orientated note, Fantasia viewed from the perspective of a collection of shorts featured some segments that focussed more on the imagery complementing the music than storytelling. Again taken in isolation, apparently the slit scan section of 2001 is credited with pulling in enough (presumably baked) people to keep a largely ignored 2001 in the cinema long enough to gain more widespread appreciation.
 
Even when stories are told out-of-sequence, they are meant to emulate The Hero's Journey, honestly. To reveal to the audience in sequence how something came to be, even if the temporal placement of events that reveal that journey are out-of-order, reverse-order, etc.

I just saw an excellent example in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. All of the movie is discovering older events because the protagonist (played by brilliant Gary Oldman) in true Detective fashion, goes discovering what has happened and jumps into action.

So, I would call the Hero's Journey a "system" where a plot device is different.

In that regard, this Detective plot device is one I like. It's not told out-of-sequence, but discovered out-of-sequence. One of my favorites is Layer Cake. Mr. X is doing fine, working for Jimmy, but he's ready to call it quits. Take his money and his career of staying mostly-above-the-fray, he's played it smart and he's ready to get out. As Jimmy says: "The reason why people like you can't retire is because you make too much money for people like me." The getting out is Mr. X's Hero's Journey. As people appear in his life, he learns the truth that will transform Jimmy from a mogul to a monster to a fool, simply by exposing more and more events in his past. and the "magic" of the truth about Jimmy will empower him to pull off the heist that means he can get out by going further in.
 
Just added the story with no story structure.

Though it's very hard to pull of it does exist (though i wish we could come up with more examples).


So often people get too preoccupied with what's going on "in" the frame to pay attention that films can also exist "outside" the frame. This discussion about story-less films brought to mind my recent experience of talking to my editor about cutting a mood trailer for fund raising trailer. I wanted her to use the visuals to tell the story but not relaying on what the images said but rather how they interacted with each other formally. My editor had a stunned face - and honesty it took me some time to comprehend what i was saying. What i meant is to look at one image and think of the most visually important element - say a color and then to cut to another image with that color, the other image also had something else - say a cluster of vertical lines of trees so we would cut to a strong vertical element and so on and on... we only licked the surface within that trailer but it was quite refreshing to go through that experiences. Needless to say most people hated the result - probably because moving image has very limited possibility in our mind (even though the images can go so much further - or at least strive to do much more).
 
kylevant said:
I'm really just starting to think that the only real place you'll find something like this is in an art gallery: video art.
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Right on. Have you ever seen those things? People watch them for ten seconds, yawn and adios.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. You should put hero's journey on a Pedestal.
 
kylevant said:
21 Grams, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - are non-linear narratives. It doesn't get any simpler than that. They jump around, have events which don't occur in order - thus non-linear.
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We get in separate cars and both drive from NYC to LA.

I tell my story sequentially. I cross the bridge, detour through DC all the way to Melrose.

You start your story in Melrose and tell it with flashbacks. Maybe you tell how you met a blonde in Arizona before you tell why you left NY.

The story is the same. You're just presenting it differently.

All stories are linear, really. They have to be, because each step takes you one step forward.

A non-linear story is not a story. It's just a mashup of images and sounds that don't go anywhere and dont make sense even when you're high.
 
"My editor had a stunned face - and honesty it took me some time to comprehend what i was saying. What i meant is to look at one image and think of the most visually important element - say a color and then to cut to another image with that color, the other image also had something else - say a cluster of vertical lines of trees so we would cut to a strong vertical element and so on and on..."

And how long will people watch before they turn it off?

It could be a very good SHORT film with lots of creativity, but people's patience isn't infinite. If you're talking 90 minute feature, you need to analyze the economics of it and the likelihood of recovering your investment.

Some of those cinematography films named above were interesting, breathtaking, etc. I don't know how big a market there is for that sort of thing, though. You can try coming up with the funds to scour the world for interesting places and cultures to film in the most impressive way possible. That's one kind of film, but it's a small fringe market, and it could be quite costly. If you were going to do that, you'd probably have to hook up with the people already doing similar films now (probably for nature tv).

But from the rest of the thread, I didn't get the sense you wanted to do the Baraka thing. Are there going to be characters? Is this a talkie? What kind of film did you originally want to make, and what kind of theme were you intending to communicate?
 
kylevant said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_narrative
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When "events are portrayed out of chronological order", you still have an underlying linearity. There are still three acts, beginning middle end, conflict resolution, character arc therefore progression yada yada yada.

The oft quoted Memento is linear in that sense. As imdb says, "one story line moves forward in time while the other tells the story backwards revealing more each time."

You don't focus on the time stamp of each sequence, but the info each sequence is communicating.

So you're wrong when you say, "It doesn't get any simpler than that." Because it's not that simple.
 
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