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Blog Post 4: Story and Film Form

The Blogging Brooke

The two forms of narrative film that interest me most are quest and bildungsroman (coming of age). A narrative film can be either fiction or nonfiction that focuses on an individual. The plot is built around their conflicts internally or in the environment around them. 

Examples for coming of age would be Call Me By Your Name and Little Women. In Call Me By Your Name, the story revolves around a teenage boy named Elio (Timotee Chalomet)  who questions his sexuality when a professor named Oliver (Armie Hammer) visits their home for the summer to work for Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg). In Little Women, you follow the lives of four sisters named Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Amy (Florence Pugh), Meg (Emma Watson), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) over a span of fifteen years. In this time, you see how each sister becomes independent and follows their dreams in life. You watch as they overcome love and loss and the changes each sister individually faces.  

Quest form in film narrative is about finding love, finding themselves, or battling a war. Some film examples that use this form are The Notebook and Rocky.  In The Notebook, Noah (Ryan Gosling) and Allie (Rachel McAdams) fell in love as kids, but were forced to separate because of the differences in their societal class. The movie tells the story of after all the time that has passed, the two are able to reunite and rekindle their love for one another. Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is a boxer training for the biggest match of his career against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). The film shows the ups and downs of his training leading up to the final fight, which he ultimately loses. Regardless of how the match ended, Rocky is proud of how he fought and now realizes that he is meant for this lifestyle. 

In conclusion, bildungsroman and quest forms interest me because they are the most relatable forms used in films. I know that these specific forms were not mentioned in the readings, however, these are the ones that I have learned previously that have stuck out to me the most. If going based off the readings, I believe that screenplay is an essential component to any film narrative. The screenplay is the building block of the entirety of the film. The actors are given their scripts, which gives minimal detail about the characters they portray. From that, they have to discover how and why their character would say or do what is written down on the page in front of them. 


what is bildungsroman? here is a helpful video breakdown.

above are examples of bildungsroman used in film.

above is an example of quest form used in film. Although Rocky was getting punched numerous times to the point where he was bleeding, he never gave up until he was physically knocked out.


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