Chapter 5 Personal Expression and Studio Production 187creative personnel have regularly found themselves at odds with tendencies
to conform excessively to what is already expected by fi lm audiences. Th ese
propensities for conformity commonly thwart authentically creative solutions
in the arts and the development of a genuine personal vision by a creative
artist or a shared and mutually developed conception by artists working in
collaboration.Types of Motion Pictures
Th e second half of our inquiry concerns the classifi cations of moving images:
“What types of motion pictures are there?” Having studied the sources of motion
pictures and the ways in which they are controlled and brought to audiences,
we will classify the forms that they have tended to assume and the ways in
which we can describe their communicative varieties and structures.
Th ere are two pairs of divergent concepts that are essential to consider. In
this unit, we will examine the contrasts between narrative and non-narrative
fi lms. In the next unit, we will continue with the second pair of complementary
concepts, documentary and fi ction.
Th is unit’s pair of contrasting concepts deals with the issue of storytelling.
Here, we ask the question: Is the fi lm telling a story?- Narrative fi lms tell a story through a succession of images and can be
fi ction or documentary, although they are more commonly seen in
fi ction fi lms. In a narrative, both within shots and between shots, we
must perceive a series of events that have a cause and eff ect relationship
in time and space. Th e viewer must have ample information from the
sequences of the motion picture to understand the series of events
as being physically linked to create a chain that forms a story, even
a brief one, such as with a commercial that recounts a very short
narrative. - Non-narrative motion pictures form a broad category of fi lms that do
not tell a distinct narrative but which instead off er a series of shots and
sequences that convey a communicative or artistic statement without
structuring their progression around events that build to a story. In
order to communicate eff ectively with viewers, non-narrative fi lms
adapt structures so that the ideas, artistic statements, and aesthetic
experiences they wish to relay are meaningful to the audience.
Filmmakers can do this by juxtaposing images in a variety of ways
to portray the subject matter. Certain non-narrative fi lms, such as
documentaries or promotional subjects, can take a clearly organized
approach by presenting images in topical groups (categorical fi lms)
or the development of an argument (rhetorical fi lms). Associational
motion pictures can apply techniques that associate images more
broadly or metaphorically to deliver a message about the primary
theme. Finally, non-narrative movies can even portray their subject
through abstract patterns of light, color, movement, and sound that
are structured through means similar to musical composition.
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