Читать книгу Storytelling for Media - Joachim Friedmann - Страница 12

Actions concerning space and its order obviously have a special meaning in narratives, when Lotman makes a border crossing a definitory prerequisite for the narrative form and the role of the hero. On this basis, the narratologist MICHAEL TITZMANN defines further spatial events and prioritizes them. According to Titzmann, an even higher significance than a border crossing is a so-called border shift. We encounter this motif again in many Westerns and other narratives in the United States that glorify the movement of settlers to the West. There, the white man not only changes the border, but with courage, energy, and determination, also brings law, order, and civilization into a country that was previously described as “uncivilized” – a semantization strategy that many narratives of colonial literature follow. The murder of the indigenous people, which went hand in hand with the moving of the border, was presented as a necessary price to pay for the establishment of the new order. This, of course, is a question of perspective: the rearrangement of the border can also be portrayed as a cruel invasion if it is depicted from the point of view of the indigenous people, as happens in Blue Bird. The myths and stories surrounding the Christian crusades also depict the history of border shifts. From the point of view of the western world, Christianity was brought back to the Holy Land in the course of the border shift, while many modern Muslim stories still portray the trauma caused by the foreign aggressors. But regardless of the reception, the destruction of a border is dramaturgically even more powerful than a shift. Stories that describe the liberation from a tyrannical despot or a totalitarian system often contain the dissolution of a border. Thus the five-part feature film epic Liberation released in 1970 is a dramatized account of the Second World War from a Soviet perspective. At the end of the film, the Soviet soldiers fraternise with German civilians, the political and semantic border that separated the two peoples no longer exists, and the Soviet flag flutters on the Reichstag. Accordingly, the film Good Bye Lenin! (2003) tells the story of the renewed border dissolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Protagonist Alexander Kerner’s mother Christiane, a loyal believer in the communist regime, is bedridden with a heart condition, so Alexander and the family try to conceal the fall of the Berlin Wall because Alexander believes that the shock of learning the truth would kill her.

The most significant event, however, is the extinction of a room: when an entire semantic room is destroyed or disappears. Examples of such events are the sinking of the Titanic, the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars, or the demise of Mordor after the destruction of the One Ring. Mount Doom burns the remaining Nazgûl and covers Mordor with lava with its final eruption. Everything Sauron has built with the power of the One Ring is destroyed, along with its creator. The entire semantic space of tyranny he has erected is destroyed. When socialist rulers, in 1950, demolished the old Berlin City Palace, the resulting worldwide indignation was possibly due to the fact that the destruction of space is perceived as such an important event. The new socialist system, already responsible for a border shift, then destroyed the space of the old order by blowing up an already-damaged building.

Chapter 3 summary:

The space in which the actions and events of a story are portrayed is more than just a stage or a container; it carries meaning and contributes to the production of meaning on a semantic level. This was first described systematically by semiotician Juri Lotman. The setting is thus a semantic field divided into two semantically complementary fields separated by a border. Only the hero of the narrative can overcome this boundary. The two semantic spaces are shaped in topological, topographic, and semantic oppositions. However, a crossing of borders is not a compelling characteristic of every story; semantizations can also be realized without crossing borders, for example through colors, language or the activation of narrative scripts. Media scientist Henry Jenkins calls the latter strategy “evocative spaces.” Space events can also be hierarchized. A border shift or border dissolution is perceived as more significant than a border crossing, a maximally significant event is a destruction of space.