The Art of Cinema Is the Way the Story Is Told

What is it about stories, anyway?

Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is key to human being existence. That it'south common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener -- an exchange nosotros acquire to negotiate in infancy.

Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature -- a face, a figure, a blossom -- and in audio, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we discover meaning. We apply stories to brand sense of our world and to share that agreement with others. They are the signal inside the noise.

So powerful is our impulse to detect story patterns that we see them even when they're non there.

In a landmark 1944 study, 34 humans -- Massachusetts college students actually, though subsequent research suggests they could accept been just about anyone -- were shown a brusque film and asked what was happening in it. The moving picture showed ii triangles and a circle moving beyond a two-dimensional surface. The only other object onscreen was a stationary rectangle, partially open on one side.

Only 1 of the test subjects saw this scene for what it was: geometric shapes moving across a plane. Everyone else came up with elaborate narratives to explain what the movements were near. Typically, the participants viewed the triangles as two men fighting and the circumvolve as a adult female trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle. Instead of registering inanimate shapes, they imagined humans with vivid inner lives. The circle was "worried." The circle and the little triangle were "innocent immature things." The big triangle was "blinded past rage and frustration."

Only if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the applied science at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the invention of the press press and movable type around 1450 led to the emergence of periodicals and the novel. The invention of the motion picture photographic camera around 1890 set off an era of feverish experimentation that led to the development of feature films by 1910. Television receiver, invented around 1925, gave rise a quarter-century later to I Love Lucy and the highly stylized grade of comedy that became known equally the sitcom.

As each of these media accomplished production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of 20th-century mass media: newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, at that place was no role left for the consumer except to consume.

Then, only as nosotros'd gotten used to consuming sequential narratives in a advisedly prescribed, point-by-indicate fashion, came the internet. The internet is the offset medium that can act like all media -- information technology tin can be text, or sound or video, or all of the higher up. It'due south nonlinear, thanks to the world broad web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It's inherently participatory -- not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in.

And it is immersive -- meaning that you lot tin use it to drill down as deeply every bit you lot similar almost anything you want to know about.

Proceed reading ...

And so powerful is our impulse to detect story patterns that we come across them even when they're not there.At first, like film and television in their earliest days, the internet served mainly as a mode of retransmitting familiar formats. For all the talk of "new media," it functioned as piffling more than a new delivery machinery for erstwhile media: newspapers, magazines, music. The emergence of P2P file-sharing networks encouraged a lot of people to go their deliveries for free. Just as disruptive as the net has been to media businesses, it'due south simply now having an bear on on media forms.

Under its influence, a new type of narrative is emerging, one that's told through many media at once in a mode that'due south nonlinear, participatory and above all, immersive. This is "deep media": stories that accept y'all deeper than an hour-long Goggle box drama or a two-hour flick or a thirty-second spot will let.

The nigh talked-about ad entrada of the by year involved a former football player who took questions about Onetime Spice on Twitter for two days and responded to the best of them minutes subsequently on YouTube. Nike+, a web service that doubles as a marketing platform, functions every bit a branded corner of cyberspace where runners tin go along their stats and tell their own stories.

Tron: Legacy was preceded by Flynn Lives, an alternate reality game that engaged millions of people worldwide in the 18 months before the movie came out. The 2010 season of the BBC'due south Doctor Who was made up of 13 television episodes and 4 that came in the form of downloadable videogames. Lost told a story and then convoluted that the audience had little choice but to work together to decipher it communally online.

"An creative movement, admitting an organic and every bit-yet-unstated ane, is forming," David Shields writes in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a book whose truth to its time is underscored past the gleeful way it samples from other sources. "What are its primal components?" Shields names several: randomness, spontaneity and emotional urgency; reader/viewer participation and involvement; anthropological autobiography; a thirst for actuality coupled with a dear of artifice; "a blurring (to the bespeak of invisibility) of any distinction betwixt fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real."

Nosotros stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we're merely partway through inventing it. Nosotros can see the outlines of a new art grade, just its grammar is as tenuous and elusive equally the grammar of cinema a century ago.

Nosotros know this much: People want to exist immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make information technology their own. Only how is the writer supposed to suit them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how practice nosotros handle the mistiness -- not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audition, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people -- in film, in television, in videogames, in advertizement, in applied science, even in neuroscience -- are trying to sort these questions out. The Fine art of Immersion is their story.

The Fine art of Immersion

• Part I: Why Exercise Nosotros Tell Stories?
• Role II: The Star Wars Generation
• **Part III: Fearfulness of Fiction
  **

simmersaffir1969.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/

Share this post