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hie relevent is the work of Propp and Levi-Strauss to the study of cinema cinema
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This essay will focus on the different approaches to narrative structure employed by folklorist, Vladimir Propp and anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss to see if they can be applied to the study of narrative cinema. In his book, Morphology of the Folktale, 1928, Vladimir Propp analysed a group of Russian folk-tales in order to see if they all shared common structural features. As the title suggests he ‘breaks down the tales according to its component parts - which he calls ‘functions’, and studies the relationship of the components to each other and to the whole’ (ibid:19-20). Propps first conclusion found that no matter how widely the tales differed in their surface details they all shared common structural properties. ‘The most basic of these were the functions of various sets of characters and actions within the tales’ (Turner:1999:79). Propp maintain that the characters should be categorised not by their looks r virtues but by the task they performed. He outlined eight character types, or ‘spheres of action’ that he believed appeared in all tales: ‘the hero’, ‘the villain’, ‘the princess’, ‘the father’, ‘the dispatcher’, ‘the helper’, ‘the donor’, ‘the false hero’. The characters would then engage in a combination of thirty-one possible narrative functions that make up a tale. Not all stories had to include all the functions but when they do appear they are in the exact order otherwise. So from his analysis Propp concluded that: 1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale. 2. The number of functions known to the fairy-tale is limited. 3. The sequence of functions is always identical. 4. All fairy-tales are of one type in regard to their structure. (Propp:1968:21-23) Propps final point raised the issue of the possibility that a universal narrative may exist, although he stressed that his work only accounted for only one type of tale. Therefore according to Cook: ‘any attempt to apply his research to a contemporary cinematic narrative reverses a fundamental principle of Propp’s method by starting from the working hypothesis that the model he found in the fairy tale is also present in other narrative forms and by transferring it to (in most cases) a single, isolated text’ (Cook:1985:235) That said many Hollywood films are found to be structured according to Propps scheme. John L. Fell article Vladimir Propp in Hollywood (Film Quarterly:1977), felt the: ‘Morphology of the Folktale has a peculiar fascination for students of genre because of parallels that can be seen between Proop’s functions and elements of narrative material that has no direct connection with either Russia or the fairy tale…such a design lends itself to westerns detective stories, horror, science fiction, and simple adventure tales, particularly as these forms…are dominated by energetic, visible active plots which make effective use of all their material’ Fell felt his reference (Fell applied a Proppian method to Kiss Me Deadly) did fit into the scheme and so suggested that a similarity did exist between the fairy-tales and film narrative.
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