Blog 8: Discussing Narrative

Blog 8

Discussing narrative

The two films we saw in class told two dramatically different stories. The first film, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ The Way Things Go, 1987, was a thirty-minute Rube Goldberg machine that used oils, foams, heavy objects and fire to knock over one final steel can at the very end. In the sense that the movie can be viewed as a story there is only one narrative the machine can follow. If the machine does not work it must start over and begin the same path again, hoping to finally complete the task. There is no way for the machine to skip a step or for a step towards to end to happen first and trigger a different step in a random order. The machine must progress linearly as it is the only way it knows how to operate.

On the other hand in the second film, Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky’s Soft Cinema, 2005, there is no pre-established narrative. The narrative is instead left up to a computer algorithm, and user controlled variables. The computer pulls from a database of isolated scenes and audio four different video frames and one audio track to compose an ever-changing cinematic experience. The chance that you see the same thing twice, the same video in the same order, is very low. In this example, the movie need not flow linearly. A scene that could come after one scene in one viewing may be shown before the same scene in the next. While this is a fun example of the technology it comes with the consequence of a more abstract project and a story that does not always make the most sense.