And Gilliam got the idea for 12 Monkeys from this French movie, and he gave up his passport to become British!

European filmmaking is much more diverse when it comes to narrative and more influenced by works of art outside of film, particularly painting. This famous French movie, for instance, doesn’t have moving pictures. You just have still pictures with a...

... the narrator talking. This is like watching a series of paintings. It depersonalises the whole experience, keeping you away from the characters personal experiences of what’s going on around them – their individual drives and ‘desires’ – and focusing instead on the world around ‘you’, dragging you into the story world through a different means. Something very similar goes on in many Staley Kubrick movies.

Everything’s connected, the events at the end of the movie are ...

... the culmination of human history; beginning, middle and end!

There’s hardly any subjectivity, even when you’re put into the frame of the weightless guy, you can still see him!

This odd ending is supposed to challenge you to figure it out by yourself, instead of spoon-feeding you information in traditional lullaby, storytelling fashion. Open-ended interpretation too because Kubrick may not see any need for an ending!

Something the Dadaist art movement did was go to a cinema late, leave, come back again, not listen to what was being said, etc. The point was to break up the narrative in their minds so they wouldn’t get inculcated into the director’s vision and understand the movie their own way. Normally in Hollywood narrative you have two tracks, the hero and heroine, and the bad guys or guys, wit the clear beginning middle and end, with a couple of flashbacks to help you along the way. Again, the first Terminator movie is a good example. A non-linear...

... however, changes your sense of time and makes you realise how the past is ever-present while the future, what we want to happen, also influences your actions while being a result of past and ‘present’ decisions.

One of the spinoffs of Dadism was surrealism (and cubism) which, ironically, was a socialist art form meant to release the subconscious from the control of capital. Surrealist movies were disjoined temporally and modelled on dreams!

Not quite. Many writers begin individual chapters in a novel with a scene in the centre of the narrative of that particular chapter, because it’s picturesque and makes you wonder what’s going on and how this can happen, then they show you how this scene came to be – the events leading up to it – then they begin from that point onwards, especially this guy!

Here’s one not terribly good example!

Interestingly enough something the Europeans get from us though when it came to storytelling is specifically getting away from the boring, linear timeline. With Arab, Persian and Indian literature you get narratives leaps, back and forth across time, whether the focus is on the hero or the bad guys plotting against him. This is meant to show you how past influences present influences future – mistakes in the past made by others influences who you are (have become) and so future mistakes you make, which will effect other people in turn. Fate is very messy!

There’s also foregrounding through ‘hints’, preparing you for what comes next. This explains why there’s this pistol with laser-sighting. He obviously doesn’t need it since he sees in infra red and has his own aiming mechanism.

Subjective-objective

presentation too!

So, just as narrative often reflects the cultural and ideological predispositions of the narrator and where he comes from, we can use narrative to make sense of non-artists making sense of culture and ideology! Narrative goes into the very way our brains are wired, how we process information and make sense of things. We learn lessons from the past, using our memories to take decisions and ‘morally define’ ourselves. Trouble is ego gets in the way and makes you assume that are moral already and that everything about you, from cradle to grave, is special. (Goes for remakes too!)

You also have to differentiate, for instance, between the story of Antar bin Shaddad and his poetry, and ‘Sirat’ Antar bin Shaddad, which is something that develop later in Arabic history thanks to the efforts of oral storytellers. A relative once explained to me the obvious falsity of the sira, which is that Antar’s father wouldn’t have disowned him for being black if his mother was black herself, a slave girl, since that way her offspring could obviously end up being up black. He would only charge her with betraying him if she was an Arab like him and then gave birth to a black child!

As for the whole deal with Abla, the historical Antar was her cousin and so angry that she didn’t want to marry him, a negro. They also invented a brother for him. Note that he’s an ‘archer’ and...

... not physically strong. The setup’s all too familiar, if you watch action movies.

And to add insult to injury, Antar was from Al-Hira, in Iraq, and a Christian to boot!!

Notice the double bladed sword, the horns, the halo , the feathers and the bird – mixture of Islamic and non-Islamic religious symbolism, but all blasphemous!

Fortunately this movie has a lot of time-travel in it, allowing people in the present to correct their mistakes in the past and so change their future, which is our present!

Here’s a practical example. In this wonderful collection of science fiction stories, by a Soviet author, you have a story called (oddly) ‘The Bride’s Room’. It begins with a crow caught in a trap in the forest and a narrator counting the number of leave fallings. This narrator throws himself in front of a passing car and persuades the driver, a scientist, to help out the crow because a cat is coming to eat it. As a consequence the scientist misses his flight to an observatory on an island, which makes him furious until he finds out a tropical storm hit and killed everyone there. From that point on he becomes a nature lover. The narrator then goes to a hotel where a girl is marrying and ugly, indulgent, overweight boy – for security, not love –and the narrator tells you about himself and recollects. He was originally an cosmonaut who visited a peaceful intelligent species on their planet, and they gave him the power to fold time. What he’s been doing since then is correct mistakes made in the past by giving people the opportunity to make different decisions about their future lives, and so the story closes with the bride at the hotel, but now marrying a completely different (and now handsome and responsible) man. You think at first the story is fantasy, with magic and wizardry (the narrator has a black beard), but its SF, and the narration deliberately tricks you by limiting the flow of information, making false conclusions.

The beauty of fairytales is that we can all relate to them, old and young, and so you can splice myth and science together with all of the attendant themes. Fantasy stories are all about living in balance and harmony with nature and each other, respecting the cosmic order that God created to serve us (not for us to own), whereas SF is about the future and technology and what we can do to change things, which makes us forget our responsibilities and the fact that technology is driven by selfish, materialistic interests, which includes Communism!

And so, the story(-telling) goes on and on!

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity

— Gilda Radner