Thinking In A Non-Narrative Way For The First Time

In any of my creative experiences, I have always had a fondness for storytelling. Whether it be through music, film, prose etc. Sometimes a mesh of them all ie. a music video for a song that is lyrically composed as a short story. There were always so many stories I wanted to tell through music, and there's still time. For now though, my creative outlet is film which gives me the opportunity to think about telling stories visually. But that's just it. A film is as much about sound as a song is, and the narrative techniques employed in a song are even more relevant when thinking about how the sound of your film can end up defining it.

All storytelling aside, I am making two films this term; one of which is in a non-narrative form. At first, I found it a struggle to think in a non-narrative way for the first time. It's certainly an alternate way of thinking to any way that I've thought before which got me thinking. Can I still tell a story but present it in a non-narrative way? It's these kinds of big questions that I'm sure my lecturers will be thrilled to learn I am asking.

I've come to the personal conclusion that all art tells a story, but when presented in the non-narrative format, the story is variable. A narrative film has coherance and structure that can only be perceived in a limited amount of ways, whereas the non-narrative film is fairly open to perception. The film's creator will have had definitive ideas about meaning when putting it together, but overall, the point of the piece will be to challenge the viewer/listener and invite them to make the film their own in terms of what feeling and thought it provokes from within themselves.

I feel like I'm starting to understand it all now. Not so fast, John Cage.