Top 43 Quotes About Film Narrative
#1. Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.
Todd Haynes
#2. I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Ruth Ozeki
#3. Music is such an integral part of a film and really drives the emotional narrative, it has to be integrated from the beginning.
Drake Doremus
#4. [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.
Nicolas Provost
#5. And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
Terry Zwigoff
#6. The narrative that Peter Jackson has put into 'The Battle of the Five Armies,' it stands alone as a film. Rather than just finishing off the story, it's like a whole new adventure all of its own. I'm very excited about it.
Richard C. Armitage
#7. I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#8. We all have an aggressive dedication to the narrative arts - comics, film, electronic gaming, and more. We spend much of our time and effort exploring those forms and have an enormous investment in the arts. We're all part of the same brotherhood as far as I'm concerned.
Jim Steranko
#9. no matter it's actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era. Even period pieces tell you more about the times they were made in than the times they depict
Gemma Files
#10. The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#11. I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.
Kevin Wilson
#12. Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.)
Anton Yelchin
#13. The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.
Emmanuel Lubezki
#14. However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.
Edward Zwick
#15. Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)
Laura Mullen
#16. Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.
Suzanne Collins
#17. It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.
Heather Brooke
#18. Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
Carter Burwell
#19. I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.
Alec Soth
#20. My show is sort of a short-film anthology, and I'm able to tell little stories that don't necessarily carry a whole episode in terms of narrative. I like the audience not being sure what they're getting. I think it's more fun to watch something when you're discovering it as you go along.
Louis C.K.
#21. I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.
David S.Goyer
#22. When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.
Tom Robbins
#23. The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density.
Christopher Nolan
#24. I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.
Stanley Kubrick
#25. A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#26. It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.
Shane Carruth
#27. I like to think traditional narrative can be subverted by an experiential narrative, by an immersion in the temporal event of the film and a a play with our expectations of that.
Rick Alverson
#28. In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.
Brian Lindstrom
#29. If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.
Clive Owen
#30. It's impossible for one or two people to go out and shoot a narrative film; you need to have a cast, the person shooting sound, whatever. But you can legitimately have a couple people and go and do a documentary.
Jeremy Coon
#31. I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.
Shane Black
#32. I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.
Alison Owen
#33. When you're going with a huge dramatic disaster film, try to keep the narrative as simple as possible.
Jeremy Bolt
#34. But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
#35. In narrative films, you set up reality, so you can limit the variables. You don't have that luxury with docs.
Adrian Grenier
#36. At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.
Julia Bacha
#37. Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens - the film breaks through the screen and does something to you.
Jason Silva
#38. When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
Alfonso Cuaron
#39. The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
Barbara Kruger
#40. The power of the documentary film, when done well, I think is usually more impacting than a narrative, at least for me. Documentaries are also cheaper, they are more accessible to make.
Richard Ray Perez
#41. 'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
Jane Campion
#42. The lumpiness of 'The Good Lie's progression - from infancy to adulthood, and from ethnic horror to gentle social comedy to a heroic gift of freedom - proclaims the film's respect for facts and truths that can't be squeezed into a smooth narrative.
Richard Corliss
#43. I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
George Hickenlooper