An Analysis Of The Narrative Theory

In the year of 2013, the film of "The Touch of Sin" directed by Jia Zhangke was awarded many international prizes, including the Best Screenplay of the 66th Cannes International Film Festival and the Best Editing of the 50th Taiwan Golden Horse Award. It was also listed on the "ten best films of the year" by the American "Film Comment". One of the reasons why the film won such good remarks is its narrative techniques. "The Touch of Sin" is adapted from four real events, which tells four stories taking place in different areas of China. These four stories are connected by the spatial and chronological clues. In terms of narration, they are separated, while in terms of form, they are closely connected with each other as a whole.Regarding the expression characteristics of "The Touch of Sin", many studies have reached thought-provoking conclusions, which are of great value to the production and expression of the documentary films. However, these studies have fallen into a predicament: they either neglect the "detailed analysis" of the text while focusing on the analysis and comment of the film theme or drift away from the text while outlining the cause-effect relation between the social background and the film theme or the other relavant relations. Not many studies focusing on the detailed analysis of the text, the narrative techniques, and the social concern of the film can be found. This paper, with the application of the theory and method of narratology, focusing on its narration, seeks to make a detailed study of the narrative techniques of the film from the four aspects of narrative context, narrative content, narrative structure, and narrative language. Besides, the analysis is made against the social background, in the hope of deeply understanding the expression characteristics and offering reference for the production of the documentary films. With the fifth generation directors and their films as the reference, the method of comparison and contrast is applied in this study for the understanding of the unique narrative characteristics of the film.This paper consists of seven parts. The first part is a brief introduction of the purpose and significance of this study, and the present situation of foreign and domestic researches. The second part is a brief review of narratology and filmic narrative theory, including the definition of narratology, the problems to be solved and the relavant narratology theory and method. The third, the fourth, the fifth and the sixth parts, which are the main body of this paper, make a detailed analysis of the narrative techniques used for "The Touch of Sin" from the aspects of narrative context, narrative content, narrative structure and narrative language.In the part of narrative context, how the film context is formed is analyzed from the perspective of social historical context. In the part of narrative content, the theme and the characterization of the film are discussed. In the part of narrative structure, the narrative structure of the film is analyzed with the Claude Bremond Paradigm and the narrative features are summarized as well. In the part of narrative language, the narrative rules and narrative space-time consciousness are analyzed from the perspective of violence aesthetic narrative techniques and audio and visual techniques. The seventh part is the conclusion of the above mentioned parts. This study believes that, different from the fifth generation director group, owing to their different growing experiences in different social and historical background, Jia Zhangke uses the method of individual narration for his narrative perspective in "The Touch of Sin", which represents Jia Zhangke’s works. As for the narrative content, the director’s sympathy for the ciphers and his investigation of the life significance become the narrative theme of the film. And as for the narrative structure, the film is characterized with the fragmentation and segmentation. And finally, the violence aesthetic narrative strategies become the most prominent feature for the audio and visual language.