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The Relationship Between Character And Narration In His Book On ...

The Relationship between Character and Narration
In his book on Understanding Film Texts: Meaning and Experience, Patrick Phillips describes the distinction between a fully formed character and the figures on screen who are their simply to provide bodies to inhabit the dietetic world.
A character, as opposed to a figure who simply performs a narrative function, will have a set of characteristics and, in realist narrative, these will usually be seen to connect directly or indirectly with the decisions they make and the actions they perform.
This essay will look at how closely narrative and character are connected, how characters create drama from personal motivation in some instances and how outside forces push them into dramatic situations in others. The essay will also consider how voice over narration affects the audiences understanding of character, and briefly discuss the presentation of narrative and character in surrealist cinema.
Narrative film is largely concerned with people's personal lives and never so much more than in the Hollywood biopic. Audiences are often fascinated by the ‘true' stories of the famous and infamous. In many films such as Ray (2004 Taylor Hackford), Blow (2001 Ted Demme) or Walk the Line (2005 James Mangold), narrative arcs and character arcs are one and the same thing. Biopics of this nature often attempt to ‘get behind' into the private lives of public figures in order to ‘fully' understand the protagonists character.
Character is defined by the way that people react to the situations they are faced with. (The man who stays to fight the good fight is brave; the man that flees is a coward.) However the situations that people find themselves in are likely to be caused by the character of a person and the choices they make. The famous opening line of Goodfellas (1990 martin Scorsese) is spoken by the protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Loitta) in voiceover and simply states, ‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster. Henry is seduced by a life of crime at a very young age by the gangsters that hang out in his neighborhood. Their affluence and frivolity that they display by spend their time drinking out side the cabstand is in stark contrast to the poverty and domestic violence that he witnesses at home.
The course of Hills life is made clear during an opening flashback sequence in which we see briefly the teenage years of Henry's life. This sequence climaxes with Henry desribing how some boys from the nieghbourhood carried his mother's groceries home out of ‘respect' whilst the screen depicts a frozen image of Henry running away from a car explosion he had started. The fiery imagery is totally clear; Henry is on the path to hell.
Throughout the film we see that Henry's success as a gangster is largely due to his natural charm, charisma and intelligence, although he never reaches a major position of power amongst the mafia hierarchy.


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