Random Cause and Effect in Film Narrative

As a spatiotemporal ontology, could film reflect reality through a series of random causality through its own narrative structure? This is a question worth exploring.

All the stories of the film unfold and end with the same structure in time, thus forming a kind of time-space relationship closure, but within this space-time relationship, creators have great freedom. Camera movement brings spatial scheduling, and nonlinear editing technology makes it possible to manipulate time in films. Therefore, the way of narration, or the structure of narration, has become a hot topic in the discussion of film creation. Except for direct films that pursue specific audiovisual effects, the core of a film story is roughly the film script. According to this relationship, before discussing the narrative structure of the film, the narrative structure of the film script should be classified first. In terms of general literary characteristics, the form of expression of the story is mainly between pure linear narrative and explosive narrative. The former is simple because it is too flat and straightforward, and the latter cannot be applied to films because of the completely open beginning or end (The time-space relationship of the film is always self-closed). However, when the script is transformed into a film, the results presented by the film are different from literary works and different from dramatic works. Although Aristotle used the so-called “three-act screenplay” standard for the story as early as the ancient Greek era, it seems too simple even for literary or dramatic creation, not to mention the fact that the expression of the film is actually difficult. Use screenplay to describe. The visual expression under the free operation of the space-time relationship endows the film with discontinuous internal time, but continuous external. This concept of unity of opposites makes it difficult for the screenplay of the film to be clearly calibrated in time, while the “one shot to end” type of film also dissolves the concept of space and time division, making screenplay dissolve into the narrative of the film like a differential.

In films, screenplay is not the ultimate source that can be traced back. If you want to understand the true dynamics of film narratives, it is necessary to put consciousness in the tracing of the relationship between time and space. Film creators are the creators of time and space for films, so some theories used to explain the world may also be used to explain the narrative of films. Although screenplay cannot effectively calibrate the narrative of the film, the story of the film is actually composed of one event after another, just like in the real world. In reality, people’s perception of continuous endless time does not rely on any external “screenplay”, but pure perception of events. This perception can also be the perception of specific objects, memories, emotions and a series of phenomena that can form specific images in the field of human cognition. At this level, the narrative of the film is closer to the phenomenon than a newly constructed performance for the audience. From this, in contrast to people’s knowledge of events in the real world, for a matter, people define the beginning and the end of the matter by its causal relationship. Although people cannot accurately correspond to a time in endless time, in memory, people have the ability to assemble one thing by tracing the cause and effect (the term “assembly” is used because the human brain seems to have the ability to complete and beautify the memory of an event by itself, according to the causality of the event). Therefore, the real fundamental of film narration is to continuously exert the causal relationship in time, and because it is similar to people’s perception of the real world, this characteristic naturally gives the film a kind of realism foundation. The audience’s perception of film narration is based on this intuitive perception of phenomena consistent with reality. This result may make people’s universal mental models naturally more willing to believe in film stories. Is there a way for the film to achieve the construction of realism through narration instead of emphasizing the “real world elements” in visual presentation?

Guy Ritchie, an excellent director, his strength is never the visual innovation, but the novelty of the narrative level, so that there is a story mode called “Guy Ritchie”. However, Guy Ritchie’s narrative methods are actually not uniform. Each of his films has a pursuit of new narrative methods. If you want to explore the source sample of the “Guy Ritchie story”, the corresponding is undoubtedly his first feature-length work, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Although the narrative structure of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is often summarized as a tree-like narrative between linear narrative and explosive narrative, or also called multi-line narrative, this is not the case. The biggest feature of linear narrative is that from cause to effect, the development of events is presented as a straight linear relationship inside, with beginning and end; explosive narratives are scattered from a single beginning (or cause) in all directions without results. All kinds of events, these events may or may not be related, but the final result is like an explosion, and there is no clear result; tree-like narratives, mutually derived stories from the same beginning, their endings may be closed or opened again, A clear end in time is the cut-off. The particularity of these narrative structures is that they all have a clear beginning, from which various events are derived. The “beginning” of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is not the beginning of an absolute narrative, but a beginning that conforms to the inherent temporal and spatial relationship of the film. It is not the cause and effect of a series of events, nor is it an event that can be regarded as the beginning of narrative motivation. It is more like a sign; an event intervenes in a series of other events under the strong promotion of some external factors. Sign of the event. A shot white ball hits other billiard balls, a series of chain reactions occur immediately, and the causality in mechanics interferes and is interconnected. And show their results in an established isolated system. This may be the best summary of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as a Guy Ritchie story, and if this relationship is described on the scale of the larger concept of the temporal and spatial relationship of the film, it can actually be described a non-deterministic fatalistic worldview. For the events triggered by the characters in this film, or the phenomena observed in sequence in the eyes of the audience, these events or phenomena actually have very independent causes, and the initial starting point is almost the free will of the characters themselves. They do seem to be a series of inconclusive beginnings. But as the film progressed, when larger and more complex network relationships were presented, the film began to let the audience determine that their contact with various events under various seemingly random chances was actually due to some kind of Necessity, a higher level of fatalistic necessity. The story of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels presents a random and chaotic correlation of Brownian motion. Just as there is a complex but uniform mechanical system behind Brownian motion, the audience will feel that a series of random events in the film are actually guided by a certain framework. Looking at it carefully, this framework is by no means destiny, but a macrostructure in the sense of structuralism. As a result, the black humor and absurdity behind the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels gradually emerged. Just like the grand narrative, the decisive influence on the motivations of the various characters in the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is not the appearance revealed by the story narrative itself, but the higher-dimensional meta-narrative hidden behind it. Before the actions of characters are actually dominated by their own free will, what influences the birth of free will is actually the social background of the characters, interpersonal relationships, the actions of other organizations, and their specific expressions in space and time. In isolation, these events are indeed a series of random events, but behind them there is a certain genealogical network within the paradigm of structuralism. This makes this black humorous story have a very strong realistic irony, because the same structure also exists in the society where people live, and it is different from the visual pursuit of real fragments or various settings as close to reality as possible. This absolute correspondence with the structuralist concept of the real world is a highly abstract concept, a direct mapping to the deep core of reality.

However, the realization of this structuralist-realistic narrative attribute can only be realized in the film, through its ontological attribute and the phenomenological connection. As mentioned above, the visualization of events in film narratives is closer to an intuitive phenomenon for the audience rather than a deeper grasp of reason. The audience’s characteristics of the events presented in the film they see are in line with the intentionality of the initiative to give to others, and this may be precisely because of the natural existence of the film’s high reality. The attribute of motion has a self-evident authenticity to people, and at the same time, it acts on the transcendental and psychological levels. Non-linear editing strengthens this effect. When the presentation of the film itself is captured by the audience as an intuitive phenomenon, the nonlinear editing brings the jump in time and space has become a self-evident, naturally captured by the gradual progress of cognitive structure from a priori to experience.

This constitutes the core of Guy Ritchie’s story, the combined effect of the ontological phenomenological remnants and the structuralist-realistic worldview, using the most basic audiovisual mode of the film to construct a great narrative reflecting the absurd reality structure, and also a proof of how the film can construct a new reality on its own.