Tzvetan Todorov is a Bulgarian philosopher, who now resides in Paris, France. He believed that there were five key stages of any narrative in film, these were:
- 1) Equilibrium: The setting is established, key characters are introduced and the story line is set up.
- 2) Disruption: Characters who are the polar opposite of the key character (oppositional characters), appear and the story takes a particular direction.
- 3) Recognition of disruption: This is the longest section of the five stages, and consists of the events of the characters.
- 4) Fixing disruption: This segment creates a lot of tension, and the problem from stage two is repaired.
- 5) Reinstatement of equilibrium: A new peace/balance is created, and all problems are resolved.
I believe that these stages are perfectly correct and can be applied to a range of film genres, for romantic comedy's or action/adventure movies, but at the same time this order is quite constrictive, and can't be applied to horror films, where the disruption and recognition of disruption stages, are repeated in a loop before advancing to stages four and five, this happens when a victim is killed but the killer escapes, the new victim introduced then repeats the same narrative until the killer is caught/killed. We can also have an unresolved equilibrium that can lead to the audience creating it's own ending, or leaving the film open to build a franchise, an example of this would be the ending to the film Inception.
No comments:
Post a Comment