Film School
2003-07-15 20:09:11.851124+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
In Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology, David Weddle looks at the U.C. Santa Barbara film school curriculum from the point of view of a father who's just realized that he's laid out $6,100 for his daughter to take film theory classes:
The prose was denser than a Kevlar flak jacket, full of such words as "diegetic," "heterogeneity," "narratology," "narrativity," "symptomology," "scopophilia," "signifier," "syntagmatic," "synecdoche," "temporality." I picked out two of them — "fabula" and "syuzhet" — and asked Alexis if she knew what they meant. "They're the Russian Formalist terms for 'story' and 'plot,' " she replied.
"Well then, why don't they use 'story' and 'plot?' "
"We're not allowed to. If we do, they take points off our paper. We have to use 'fabula' and 'syuzhet.' "
Good article if you haven't got your "academia and reality don't mix" dander up recently.