What is a Narrative film?
Simply put, a narrative film is a movie that tells a story. So any form of film that follows a chain of events is narrative.
Many people think that only fiction movies are narrative. But documentaries and movies that tell a real story can also be considered narrative films as long as there is a beginning point that develops throughout the events and leads to a sort of conclusion.
In this post, we will be focusing on the 2 main types of narrative: The liniar and the non-linear narrative.
The Linear Narrative
Linear is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a story that follows one line of narrative.
So, imagine that the movie is a journey from point A to point B. Throughout this journey, the events will drive the story of the movie.
The movie first starts with the stage of exposition. This part is often referred to as the stage of equilibrium. Here the scene is being set to the audience, and the world of the characters is presented.
Then, the disequilibrium. This is when something disrupts the state of normal and causes the events of the story to happen.
As the events complicate, the events of the movie ultimately reach the climax. A point where the stakes for the characters are the highest.
When this peak point is reached, the main characters will try now harder to restore the equilibrium.
The movie ends with the resolution. Here, the main characters would achieve in returning to the initial point. They could also reach another point that better or worse from where they initially started at the beginning of the movie. But they learned their lesson and suffered the circumstances.
For example, let’s use Toy Story.
By the end of the movie, Buzz has accepted his fate as a toy and is welcomed into Andy’s group of toys. whereas at the beginning he wasn’t even there.
So, to put it short, a linear narrative goes like this:
Movies start where characters in their everyday life, something happens that shakes this normality. Then, things get worse as the characters try to fix them. The movie ends with the characters returning to where they started or learning something new or even failing hard at it.
As you might now be thinking: Not all movies follow this linear narrative structure… you are correct.. here comes the non-linear structure.
Non-linear Narrative
The non-linear narrative tends to break up this simple line and put it back together in a different order.
These are the movies that do not follow the three act structure.
All Movies have a begining, middle, and end… But not necessarly in this order
Godards
Movies that follow this type of narrative like to mix things up. And because the events are not told in a straightforward manner, it will be up to the audience to do the thinking and guessing in order to understand the story and figure out the chronological order of the events of the story.
This doesn’t mean that movies with a non-linear narrative are ALWAYS hard to understand…
Almost all French New Wave movies follow the non-linear narrative… But Let’s have more known and popular movies as examples in this post.
A good example of a complicated non-linear narrative would be Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
Memento has two sets of narratives running throughout the film. One in black and white and one in color.
These two narratives are broken up and mixed together! So you see a piece of one then a piece of the second and then back to the first… Scenes in black and white and other scenes in color.
Already the narrative is pretty nonlinear.
But memento takes it another step further. The colored narrative is actually being shown to us in Reverse.
The black and white sequence starts at the beginning and the colored sequence starts at the end. This completely screws up the narrative with the final clip transitioning from black and white to color showing the end of the first narrative and the start of the second.
I think that is as much complicated as it can be for a movie. But there are many other examples for movies that do not have a linear narrative structure but are still easy to follow and understand.
let’s take a look at Forrest Gump as an example. The movie has a nonlinear narrative and it’s really easy to understand.
Many people will argue that Forrest Gump actually follows a linear structure… After all, it follows Forrest from when he was a boy, we see him grow up to an adult. But the thing is it’s a broken story.
The movie starts with Forrest waiting on a bus stop, and the movie continues as Forrest is telling other people how he came to this point.
So, in a way, Forrest Gump starts from the end and takes us back to the beginning through Forrest’s stories.
In the case of Forrest Gump, the use of the non-linear narrative was not to make the movie more complicated or to make an artistic statement. The non-linear narrative can also be a convenient way for the writers to easily skip through all the boring bits that happen in between the events of a movie.
Conclusion
There is no better or correct narrative structure. Linear narratives are of course very successful. But it’s important to try out new things when writing your own screenplay.
If you are writing a screenplay, try messing up the order of events by having the end at the beginning or, putting bits in the wrong order. See if it makes your story more compelling and powerful. If it doesn’t add anything then leave it you’ve tried and that’s what’s important.
