After reading Teacher Zhang Yuhua's "Television Narrative Discourse", I have a new and deeper understanding of TV drama narrative. Teacher Zhang Yuhua's works have a clear statement structure, strong logic, and easy to understand. It gave me a lot of inspiration on the level of image narrative, which diverged into the multi-level source research of the impact of images on the audience, giving me a new understanding of the world of image narrative.
According to what Mr. Zhang Yuhua introduced in the book, the narrative research of TV dramas can be carried out from two major levels: First, the research on narrative structure, that is, focusing on issues such as storyline and action elements, focusing on abstraction. The construction of theoretical models; the second is the study of narrative discourse, which is inclined to narrative behavior and exploring the discourse methods and discourse techniques to convey good stories.
The first is the study of narrative orientation. Regarding the issue of narrative orientation, classic narrative theories mostly use the term "narrative perspective". The widely popular one is Todorov's "Three Rules" - omniscient perspective, internal perspective and external perspective. When the director of a TV series enjoys the supreme right to speak, knows everything about the various characters and things under his camera, and expresses them omnisciently, it is called an omniscient perspective. For example, many TV series such as "The Burning Years" are based on this omniscient perspective, which is also the most commonly used narrative perspective in long-form TV series.
From an internal perspective, the playwright and director are equivalent to the characters in the TV series. What he sees, thinks, and feels is all attached to the characters in the TV series. For example, many of Aunt Qiong Yao's TV series show sympathy or recognition for the mistress's superiority, and some of them contain her personal portrayal.
The outside perspective means that the director of the play is limited to watching from the outside. Regardless of the camera's words or the characters' words, there are only visible and audible behaviors such as environment, foreign trade, behavior, sound, and human voices. There are few in-play characters. The expression of a character’s thoughts and feelings. However, due to the stylistic characteristics of the TV series and the constraints placed on it by the mass media platform, the use of external perspective is undoubtedly inappropriate and risks losing the audience. Therefore, the external perspective narrative perspective is more common in movies.
In this book, the author prefers to adopt Genette's terminology definition in "Fiction and Prose": story narration in the third person, indirectly, is "heterogeneous story narration" , the other is narrated in a personal and first-person manner, which is called "homogeneous story narration". In addition, perspective deviance also has unique aesthetic value in the narrative discourse of TV dramas. In order to overcome the limitations of the established perspective, in order to achieve the depth of meaning conveying and the high quality of aesthetic conveying, I, who was not present in the first person, can confidently use the identity of an eyewitness to show unwitnessed facts, or become invisible. The omniscient perspective of the unknown. The deviance in the narrative perspective makes each monologue carry more weight. It is no longer simply understood as a sentence, but each person shows their own performance of the same thing to the audience and tells the audience all their inner thoughts. , the audience can draw their own deep understanding of the connotation of the TV series based on all their discussions, and it will not be a superficial understanding that induces the audience to become accomplices of the drama director and pay attention to the textual meaning in the aesthetic interface. connotation, thereby maximizing aesthetic value.
The second thing that impressed me the most was the introduction of the concept of "space-time knot". Bakhtin once proposed the concept of "space-time knot" when studying the narrative mode of novels, defining it as the area where time and space intersect. Drawing on this theory, the existence of representative and meaningful "space-time knots" in TV dramas also provides theoretical support for the author's analysis.
The living room has undoubtedly become a place to witness the resolution of conflicts. Just like the pre-war planning and post-war summary during ancient marches and wars were all conducted in the camp, the living room in urban love dramas has also become a place of thought. The centralized expression of opinions conveys the director's intentions. In the book, the author introduces the story of Li Xuezhi's family in different time and space in the "living room" as an example. As such a time and space intersection, the living room brings together people from different professions, statuses, classes, ages, customs, and regions, breaking through The original social spatial distance is eliminated, thereby performing contrast, conflict and integration in the "knot of time and space".