WHAT IS STORYTELLING IN FILMS? (In the Entertainment industry.)

Storytelling / Photo Credit: Mind Waves - Marilena

WHAT IS STORYTELLING IN FILMS? (In the Entertainment industry.)  

Bruce Bisbey…please follow me at: https://dumbdogproductions.com/

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What is Storytelling in Films?

Storytelling Films

The story is at the heart of any good film. Special effects, setting, stars – unless there is a good story

to be told – are meaningless.

Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view.

The term "storytelling" can refer in a narrow sense specifically to oral storytelling and also in a looser sense to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.

Film has developed out of a narrative and dramatic tradition in which the art of storytelling is a central concern. Yet filmmakers have also challenged the seductive and manipulative power of story through playful resistance to narrative convention or by exploring other elements of the medium: the interplay of image and sound, rhythm and gesture, rather than reliance on plot mechanics or character psychology. But the audience for non-narrative film is small: the rapt faces of the aircraft passengers watching the flight attendant point out the nearest exit, remind us that we enjoy the frisson of disaster but need to believe in the possibility of a happy ending.

Storytelling predates writing. The earliest forms of storytelling were usually oral combined with gestures and expressions. In addition to being part of religious rituals, some archaeologists believe rock art may have served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures. The Australian aboriginal people painted symbols from stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art and dance, which bring understanding and meaning of human existence through remembrance and enactment of stories. People have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media (such as sand and leaves) to record stories in pictures or with writing. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.

With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be created, improvisational by impromptu storytellers, as well as committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world.

Contemporary storytelling

Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms (fairy-tales, folktales, mythology, legends, fables etc.), it has extended itself to representing history, personal narrative, political commentary and evolving cultural norms. Contemporary storytelling is also widely used to address educational objectives. New forms of media are creating new ways for people to record, express and consume stories. Tools for asynchronous group communication can provide an environment for individuals to reframe or recast individual stories into group stories. Games and other digital platforms, such as those used in interactive fiction or interactive storytelling, may be used to position the user as a character within a bigger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, employ storytelling narrative techniques to communicate information about their topic. Self-regulatory stories, created for their cathartic and therapeutic effect, are growing in their use and application, as in Psychodrama, Drama Therapy and Playback Theater. Storytelling is also used as a means by which to precipitate psychological and social change in the practice of trans-formative arts.

Oral traditions of storytelling are found in several civilizations’; they predate the printed and online press. Storytelling was used to explain natural phenomena, bards told stories of creation and developed a pantheon of gods and myths. Oral stories passed from one generation to the next and storytellers were regarded as healers, leader, spiritual guides, teachers, cultural secrets keepers and entertainers. Oral storytelling came in various forms including songs, poetry, chants and dance.

Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts of epics such as the Odyssey and Beowulf. Lord found that a large part of the stories consisted of text which was improvised during the telling process.

Lord identified two types of story vocabulary. The first he called "formulas": "rosy-fingered dawn", "the wine-dark sea" and other specific set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epics. Lord, however, discovered that across many story traditions, fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines which are repeated verbatim or which use one-for-one-word substitutions. In other words, oral stories are built out of set phrases which have been stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories.

The other type of story vocabulary is theme, a set sequence of story actions that structure a tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds from event-to-event using themes. One near-universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the "rule of three": Three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked. A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example: a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place / he disguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of little account (a crone, a tavern maid or a woodcutter) / who immediately recognizes him / the commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resources of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories. Themes may be no more than handy prefabricated parts for constructing a tale, or they may represent universal truths – ritual-based, religious truths, as James Frazer saw in The Golden Bough, or archetypal, psychological truths, as Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: Märchen and Sagen. These are German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents, however we have approximations:

Märchen, loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (lit. little stories), take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular, at an indeterminate time in the past. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little effect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.

Sagen, best translated as "legends", are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lovers' leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO stories and stories of supernatural beings and events.

Another important examination of orality in human life is Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Ong studies the distinguishing characteristics of oral traditions, how oral and written cultures interact and condition one another, and how they ultimately influence human epistemology.

Storytelling and learning

Storytelling is a means for sharing and interpreting experiences. Peter L. Berger says human life is narrative rooted, humans construct their lives and shape their world into homes in terms of these groundings and memories. Stories are universal in that they can bridge cultural, linguistic and age-related divides. Storytelling can be adaptive for all ages, leaving out the notion of age segregation. Storytelling can be used as a method to teach ethics, values and cultural norms and differences. Learning is most effective when it takes place in social environments that provide authentic social cues about how knowledge is to be applied. Stories function as a tool to pass on knowledge in a social context. So, every story has 3 parts. First, the setup (The Hero's world before the adventure starts). Second, The Confrontation (The hero's world turned upside down). Third, The Resolution (Hero conquers villain, but it's not enough for Hero to survive. The Hero or World must be transformed). Any story can be framed in such format.

Human knowledge is based on stories and the human brain consists of cognitive machinery necessary to understand, remember and tell stories. Humans are storytelling organisms that both individually and socially, lead storied lives. Stories mirror human thought as humans think in narrative structures and most often remember facts in story form. Facts can be understood as smaller versions of a larger story; thus, storytelling can supplement analytical thinking. Because storytelling requires auditory and visual senses from listeners, one can learn to organize their mental representation of a story, recognize structure of language and express his or her thoughts.

Stories tend to be based on experiential learning, but learning from an experience is not automatic. Often a person needs to attempt to tell the story of that experience before realizing its value. In this case, it is not only the listener who learns, but the teller who also becomes aware of his or her own unique experiences and background. This process of storytelling is empowering as the teller effectively conveys ideas and, with practice, is able to demonstrate the potential of human accomplishment. Storytelling taps into existing knowledge and creates bridges both culturally and motivational toward a solution.

Stories are effective educational tools because listeners become engaged and therefore remember. Storytelling can be seen as a foundation for learning and teaching. While the story listener is engaged, they are able to imagine new perspectives, inviting a transformative and empathetic experience. This involves allowing the individual to actively engage in the story as well as observe, listen and participate with minimal guidance.  Listening to a storyteller can create lasting personal connections, promote innovative problem solving and foster a shared understanding regarding future ambitions. The listener can then activate knowledge and imagine new possibilities. Together a storyteller and listener can seek best practices and invent new solutions. Because stories often have multiple layers of meanings, listeners have to listen closely to identify the underlying knowledge in the story. Storytelling is used as a tool to teach children the importance of respect through the practice of listening. As well as connecting children with their environment, through the theme of the stories, and give them more autonomy by using repetitive statements, which improve their learning to learn competence. It is also used to teach children to have respect for all life, value inter-connectedness and always work to overcome adversity. To teach this a Kinesthetic learning style would be used, involving the listeners through music, dream interpretation, or dance.

Storytelling as art form

Aesthetics The art of narrative is, by definition, an aesthetic enterprise, and there are a number of artistic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories. Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure with identifiable beginnings, middles, and endings, or exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement, normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporarily, which includes retention of the past, attention to present action and protection/future anticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is "arguably the most important single component of the novel"; a given heteroglossia of different voices dialogically at play – "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers"; possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed in intertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc. to other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward bildungsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.

Festivals Storytelling festivals feature the work of several storytellers. Elements of the oral storytelling art form include visualization (the seeing of images in the mind's eye), and vocal and bodily gestures. In many ways, the art of storytelling draws upon other art forms such as acting, oral interpretation and performance studies.

Several storytelling organizations started in the U.S. during the 1970s. One such organization was the National Association for the Perpetuation and Preservation of Storytelling (NAPPS), now the National Storytelling Network (NSN) and the International Storytelling Center (ISC). NSN is a professional organization that helps to organize resources for tellers and festival planners. The ISC runs the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.  Australia followed their American counterparts with the establishment of storytelling guilds in the late 1970s. Australian storytelling today has individuals and groups across the country who meet to share their stories. The UK's Society for Storytelling was founded in 1993, bringing together tellers and listeners, and each year since 2000 has run a National Storytelling Week the first week of February.

Currently, there are dozens of storytelling festivals and hundreds of professional storytellers around the world, and an international celebration of the art occurs on World Storytelling Day.

Emancipation of the story

In oral traditions, stories are kept alive by being told again and again. The material of any given story naturally undergoes several changes and adaptations during this process. When and where oral tradition was pushed back in favor of print media, the literary idea of the author as originator of a story's authoritative version changed people's perception of stories themselves. In centuries following, stories tended to be seen as the work of individuals rather than a collective effort. Only recently when a significant number of influential authors began questioning their own roles, the value of stories as such – independent of authorship – was again recognized. Literary critics such as Roland Barthes even proclaimed the Death of the Author.

References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, WikiBooks, Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Film Making Stuff, Hiive, History Channel, Film Daily, New York Film Academy, The Balance, Careers Hub, The Numbers, Film Maker, Film Site, TV Guide Magazine, Blurb, Media Match, Quora, Creative Skill Set, Chron, Investopedia, Variety, No Film School, WGA, BBC, Daily Variety, The Film Agency, Best Sample Resume, How Stuff Works, Studio Binder, Career Trend, Producer's Code of Credits, Truity, Production Hub, Producers Guild of America, Film Connection, Variety, Wolf Crow, Get In Media, Production Beast, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, UCAS, Frankenbite, Realty 101, Careers Hub, Screen Play Scripts, Elements of Cinema, Script Doctor, ASCAP, Film Independent, Any Possibility, CTLsites, NYFA, Future Learn, VOM Productions, Mad Studios, Rewire, DP School, Film Reference, DGA, IATSE, ASC, MPAA, HFPA, MPSE, CDG, AFI, Box Office Mojo, Rotten Tomatoes, Indie Film Hustle, The Numbers, Netflix, Vimeo, Instagram, Pinterest, Metacritic, Hulu, Reddit, NATO, Mental Floss, Slate, Locations Hub, Film Industry Statistics, Guinness World Records, The Audiopedia, Imagination for People, P.O.V.,

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Storytelling / Photo Credit: Mind Waves - Marilena