re: Narrated Movies - Does this make a big difference?

Sin City

This thread aroused my interest and I started doing what I do. A Goggle search revealed a Wiki article on different ways to use narratives in literature & movies.

I know this won't be new for some of you guys but for those of us that have never studied film this might be educational.

Both of these types of narratives are used mainly to achieve a plot twist:

Nonlinear Narratives

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Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order. It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory but has been applied for other reasons as w

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In the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino influenced a tremendous growth in nonlinear films with Pulp Fiction (1994).[6] Other important nonlinear films include Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1994), Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999), and Karen and Jill Sprecher's Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001).[6] David Lynch experimented with nonlinear narrative and surrealism in Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006).

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List of nonlinear films


Unreliable Narrator

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An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised.[1] The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction.[2] This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually to deceive the reader or audience.[1] Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.

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One of the earliest examples of the use of an unreliable narrator in film is the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, from 1920.[10] In this film, an epilogue to the main story is a twist ending revealing that Francis, through whose eyes we see the action, is a patient in an insane asylum, and the flashback which forms the majority of the film is simply his mental delusion. A much more recent film (and play) to use a similar plot device is Amadeus. This tale is narrated by an elderly Antonio Salieri from an insane asylum, where he claims to have murdered his rival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is left unclear whether the story actually happened, or whether it is the product of Salieri's delusions; this is especially ambiguous, as there is no concrete historical evidence that Salieri killed Mozart.

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In Citizen Kane (1941), the story of Charles Foster Kane is told by five different acquaintances of his, each with varying opinions of the character.

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The 1995 film The Usual Suspects reveals that the narrator had been deceiving another character, and hence the audience, by inventing stories and characters from whole cloth.[15][16] In the 1999 film Fight Club, it is revealed that the narrator suffers from multiple personality disorder and that some events were fabricated, which means only one of the two main protaganists actually exists, as the other is in the narrator"s mind. [17] In the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, it is eventually revealed that the narrator is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and many of the events he witnessed occurred only in his own mind.[18]

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There are plenty of other movies mentioned in the article I didn't include.

thunderpants