Fiction film
While it is highly arguable whether news are narratives, and most home movies clearly are not, fiction film is the very yardstick of filmatic narrative. But, can such highly polished and audience-gripping artworks be stretched or shrunk?
Obviously they can, as most major films these days are released on DVD, containing extra scenes from the story that were deleted from the theatre version of film.
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At least three ways of including this extra material seem widespread:
In Gladiator
, the extra scenes are available on an extra disc, and have to be viewed outside of the running of the film.
In The Lord of the Rings
the extra scenes are included, while the theatre version is not available. (The accompanying booklet specifies where the DVD version is different from the theatre version, however.)
The most flexible alternative is to let the viewer choose between long and short versions, as is the case in Die Hard
, where the viewer selects between the theatrical version and the longer edit before she or he starts to watch the movie.
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The longer versions of DVD films include scenes that do not have consequences for the outcome, so apparently they are not strictly needed to tell the story.
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It is of course possible to include material that alters the film's story, as is the case with Cinema Paradiso
, where the DVD contains the original, much longer and quite different version. It could be that this will become widespread as films more and more are made with the DVD market in mind, but for now, such examples are very rare; most films tell the same story in all their versions.
Studying these different versions of the same story reveals a consistent logic, which may be effectively described with Roland Barthes' "Introduction to the Structural analysis of Narratives
". (This is an early version of Barthes' narrative theory. It is less complex and refined than his later writings, of which S/Z
is the major work, but this simple structure suits our purpose here.) In the essay, Barthes separates between functions and indices.
Indices are descriptive bits that together form our understanding of characters and setting. Functions are actions characters perform that pair with corresponding actions. If someone buys a gun, and fires it later (or explicitly does not fire it), it becomes a function. Most functions are there to flesh out the story, but some are crucial to the story. If one of these crucial functions is changed, the story also changes its course. Barthes calls these functions nuclei, while the less crucial functions are catalysers.
To shorten a story, one may always remove indices and catalysers. The story will be less rich in its description and psychological detail, but we will experience it as the same story nevertheless.
A preliminary study of six DVD films with alternative versions and outtakes (Amadeus
, Apocalypse Now!
, Cinema Paradiso
, Die Hard
, Gladiator
, and Two Towers
) revealed exactly this: with the exception of the ending of Cinema Paradiso, the scenes that are left out of the films are indices and catalysts. They have been taken out and may be inserted into the film without changing the course of the storyline. It is just the description of places and characters that change.
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Longer edits of the same movie may also make each scene longer.
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Nuclei may be told shorter or longer. Instead of writing: "he pushed down the handle, opened the door, entered the room and closed the door behind him," one might write: "he entered." In fact, actions can always be broken down in chains of smaller actions, or summarized by using a single word. We can recognize a chain of actions exactly because we have a name for it. Recognition is to see that the chain of actions is one we have encountered before, and summarized under a name. Barthes explains in S/Z
:
[W]hoever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous), and this title embodies the sequence; the sequence exists when and because it can be given a name [...]. (19)
To shorten a sequence in a word is not as easy in cinematic language without using a narrator's voice. But a skilled author can come a very long way by showing a short clip or two, that metonymically stand for a longer chain of actions (a couple dressed for wedding in front of a priest: only a couple of seconds, and the concept of wedding is implied). Study commercial advertisements or the summaries at the beginning of an episode in a drama series, and you will see that such metonymies are in fact so powerful that this difference between natural and cinematic language is theoretical rather than practical.
Indices and catalysts may be left out, and nuclei may be summarized in a single word, so a narrative may be shortened to the absurd at the cost of the pleasurable detail. (In a parodic demonstration, Gérard Genette
summarizes the twelve-volume À La Recherche du temps perdu into "Marcel becomes a writer.") These inner mechanics of storytelling make great classic stories work, and at the same time make it possible to shorten a story, by making it less detailed.
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We could sketch an interface for a stretchfilm narrative based on our small experiments with stretchtext . It does not seem likely that the footnote technique used for home film and news with work with fiction film, however.
When a viewer sees a marker that an inserted scene is possible, he or she also knows that nothing important will happen in this extra part. It can be skipped, or else it would have to be included in the shorter version of the story. Many audience members might still want to see it (as much as they buy the longer DVD versions of films they have already seen), but it would still destroy much of the film's suspense.
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A very important pleasure in movies is the suspense, or what Barthes called the Hermeneutic Code (S/Z p. 19
). The excitement of not knowing what will happen next, and how it all will end. This is what film studies most often call suspense. Inserting footnote or stretchfilm markers in a narrative will puncture this pleasure.
This is not to deny that there may be different pleasures in different length of a story. The Lord of The Rings
series shows that there are. The three-hour theatre version is pleasurably long for a Hobbit fan, but at the limit of what most others can stand in one sitting without pauses. In the comfort of one's own home, and with the convenience of a remote with a pause button, a film can be watched in portions, like one reads a thick novel, and the Tolkien fan can enjoy the visualization of even more of the books' details.
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To include both versions of the film (or maybe even three or four if wanted), one should make the choice of length independent of scenes. This would function like Nelson's throttle
, as tested in my amateur travel movie.
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The technically simplest version would be the solution in the Die Hard DVD
, where the viewer chooses from a menu before starting to watch. Different versions should be marked with their length (one-hour, two-hour, etc.), and perhaps a designation of "theatre version" and "director's cut" where applicable. A more flexible version would be an interface device with which the viewer can go back and forth between versions while the movie is playing.
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Why would this shifting of versions work with Hollywood movies and not with my private holiday film? Just because I am not Peter Jackson. While I as a DVD viewer trust that the story of Two Towers is worthwhile - in both the long and the very long version - I also know that my home tape does not have the same overall quality.
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Viewing a narrative involves a contract between the audience and the film. It is a narrative precisely because it is worth telling. Something extraordinary happened, and we agree to sit back patiently and learn what this was. Home film is not necessarily about something worth telling. It is a collection of records with some motivation, but little previous consideration to what the final result will be.
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