Posts Tagged ‘ Interview ’

Elles: a movie about culture, morality and the otherness…

We have talked in other posts about the value of understanding a story in different levels, that is, discursive levels that tell a story from different perspectives, at the same time rational and emotional, at the same time organic and raw, at the same time intimate and common to may people. When one moves from one of this stages to another, it is something you can feel in an intuitive way, but sometimes, if things happen over and over as in this case, the experience conforms parts or segments that create a new totality, a new reality.

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Film discourse and the work of a qualitative researcher (part three)

Discourse structure 4: Broken stories. Here we find stories told from different perspectives or multiple versions of one same event that complement each other to make out a final version. Or it is stories that travel through time with no specific rule or pattern. Movies have many examples of this. They are frequently referred as a non-linear narration. They also include stories told as a jigsaw puzzle or pastiche of multiple elements that allow a construction of the story as one goes on and on uncovering new pieces. Some movie directors can be identified for directing this type of movies, although they do not always do so: Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Federico Fellini, Peter Greenaway and David Cronenberg, to mention a few.

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Film discourse and the work of a qualitative researcher (part two)

Discourse Structure 2: Parallel stories. In Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) two stories are told back-to-back. One is the story of a documentary filmmaker (played by Woody Allen) who has never had commercial success but feels enthusiastic about his new project regarding  the life and work of a Jewish humanistic philosopher that believes humanity has a possibility of achieving a fulfilled life. The other story develops around the life of a successful ophthalmologist who has a beautiful family and is about to receive a life time achievement acknowledgment, but who’s life is being threatened by a mistress who is willing to tell his family about them if he does not marry her as he promised. Both stories are, apparently, non related until the end when the two main characters meet in a party and begin to tell each other their story which results in a twist of fate outcome.

Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989. Martin Landau (as the ophthalmologist) is capable of seeing reality, and Woody Allen (the documentary filmmaker), one that can see the dreams of people. Their lives hit a crossroad to create a new story.

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