Читать книгу Storytelling for Media - Joachim Friedmann - Страница 4

One obvious constant in stories is the protagonist. In all narratives, of all cultures, we encounter beings with goals, desires, and emotions. Aristotle noted that “men in action” (11) are imitated in stories, and when it comes to imitating acting people, storytellers should, obviously, be inspired by reality and life. LINDA SEGER, a script consultant from Hollywood, also assumes this. For her, the best way to create a film character is through detailed research.

A sculpture of Venus of Milo. Image in public domain.

Psychology, profession, milieu of origin, and appearance are for her the constituent framework to create as credible and lifelike figures as possible. If one looks at series such as The Wire, the socially critical films by Ken Loach, or the novels of Jonathan Franzen, this finding also applies. But what about a character like Colonel Hathi, the disciplined elephant from Disney’s The Jungle Book, or HK-47, the merciless battle droid from the computer game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic? Here even the most intensive research would not have led anywhere, because in real life there are no elephants with military ranks or cynical war robots. Such figures are not credible in a naturalistic sense, but primarily transport a worldview and embody a theme. Author ROBERT MCKEE states:

“A character is no more a human being than the Venus of Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature.” (375)

In this context, an elephant, a marionette like Pinocchio or – as in The Brave Little Toaster – an ensemble of household appliances can also become narrative figures. Whether they are life-like or not does not matter at first.

Pinocchio is a character based on an Italian children’s novel. Image in public domain.

In structuralist narrative research, on the other hand, neither the credibility nor the metaphorical or thematic location of a character are the focus of attention. Theorists such as Vladimir Propp or ALGIRDAS JULIEN GREIMAS emphasize the figure’s function in the narrative’s plot. Thus, Propp identifies seven figures who can complete all the actions and fulfull all the roles in a Russian fairy tale: the villain, the donor, the helper, the princess and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero. In fact, Propp’s scheme can also be applied to other types of text: a character like Conan in Conan the Barbarian, for example, is neither credibly taken from life nor does he necessarily convey a theme or a world view. But Conan is always a hero, whether in the literary mode, the comic version, the film adaptations, or in the computer game Conan Exiles. Even in documentary, where the featured character ar not actors and dialogues are not prescripted often, in editing, attributes are exaggerated or certain details are withheld to craft the people into characters who serve the telling of the story. In the following chapters, we will take a look at the various different methods with which characters can be constructed.