Non-narrative film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The episodic narrative tradition which Aristotle indicates has systematically been subverted in the 20th century modernism. This is particularly true in the experimental cinematic tradition where the folding and reversal of episodic narrative is now a commonplace. Moreover, modernist writers and modernist film directors seem more concerned that plot is an encumbrance to their artistic medium than an assistance.
When I first read Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” the title started me thinking whether there was such a thing as non-narrative cinema, and I guess non-narrative films can be labeled contemplative cinema or cinematical essays.
A key text concerned with the subversion of conventional narrative and plot is Amos Vogel’s chapter 4 in his Film as a Subversive Art, titled the destruction of plot and narrative, in which he cites writers Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Burroughs, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, and filmmakers Bresson, Godard, Skolimowski, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Eisenstein, Man Ray, Richter, Epstein, Brakhage, Peterson, Bartlett, and dadaists and surrealists Tzara, Breton and Buñuel. At the end of this chapter, Vogel adds that the commercially successful films are still the ones that employ 19th century plot structures such as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music and Love Story.
Related
stream of consciousness - abstract novel, abstract film, abstract art - anti-novel - documentary film - narrative - plotlessness
Key texts
- The Destruction of Plot and Narrative (chapter 4 in Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art
