A Study on the Structural Approaches to Narrative Analysis in Cinema

Exploring the cinema would provide the conditions for the possibility of understanding the various elements and factors which, in different spatial and temporal situations, become the “dominant element”. Accordingly, “Structural Approaches to Narrative Analysis” investigate the representations of the “dominant element” in those “narratives” which goes beyond the individual level; approaches that deal with the various devices and techniques which construct the text. The implementation of “Structural Analysis of Narrative” would be made possible through the theory of “formalism”, according to which the study of the form of an artworks is basically privileged over the study of its content. In this sense, the value and standing of an artwork is rooted in its form, and not in the meaning that it nevertheless seeks to convey; and thus such a study would focus, not on the aim and intentions of the author, but on investigating those devices and techniques which elevates an artwork to the state of high and/or critical art. By deploying the Proppean methodology (Morphology of Fairy Tales), this article aims to construct a model for Structural Narrative Analysis in Cinema. According to Propp, the dominant element in any narrative is in fact its “function”, understood by him as the unit of narrative analysis. He himself has redefined the Fairy Tales according to their “functions”.Given the fact that Cultural Studies is basically a critical approach, it seems reasonable to say that conducting structural approaches to narrative analysis through Cultural Studies would result in a close analysis of cinema. In order to illustrate the possibilities and significance of this approach, here we have focused on one of Masoud Kimiaee’s works.