Narrative Analysis of a Feature Doc/Film

Paper details:

Instructions By next week, students should watch a feature length (90mins Approx.) character documentary or observational documentary, one that has a central character or group of characters. Students must then write a 750 word analysis of the theme, the story, and the narrative. Theme, story, and narrative, are to be understood in the context we described in our lesson on the 12th January: Theme is your broad subject matter. It could be: the war in Syria, the COVID19 pandemic, the decline of the cinema industry. Story is a specific series of events pertaining to an individual or a group of individuals within that broad theme: refugees flee the war, a doctor treating COVID19 patient in a hospital, or the manager as she tries to save her cinema from economic collapse. Narrative a perspective within a story, one story could have many narratives: the narrative of the refugee fleeing or the soldier pursuing them, the doctor or the patient, the manager or the staff member in the cinema. Within a theme there are many stories, and within a story there are many narratives. Identify and extrapolate each of these in your essay, with a focus on the narrative. In our lesson we also discussed the Hero’s Journey, a concept developed by Joseph Campbell in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. Students must highlight the three basic steps in the cycle of the Hero’s Journey: leaving home, encountering danger, obtaining victory then returning to safety older, wiser, and stronger. It can be any film of your choice that you find on a streaming service or that you pay for if you want to/can afford to. This is a link to a short article to refresh you of the Hero’s Journey (in case you don’t want to read the whole book!) with some useful link, diagrams, and videos: https://nofilmschool.com/heros-journey-fundamentals Attached into this assignment are some of the diagrams and images from the class notes, re-read them if you need to. At the end of our previous lesson I did say that you could analyse a fiction film if you cannot find an observation documentary. Please do this only if you absolutley cannot find a documentary. My strong preference is for you to analyse how documentaries can fit into what are generally considered to be fictional story narrative structures. If you cannot find a documentary on any of the streaming platforms available to you I have made available a feature film I worked on, Jaha’s Promise, for each of you to downloagnad via this link: https: //we.tl/t-oguXTdd3pRSHOW MORE