Understanding Film Editing and Narrative Techniques

Posted on Feb 12, 2025 in Arts and Humanities

Mounting

Mounting refers to the sorting, cutting, and pasting of different pieces of film fragments. Its smallest unit is called a photogram. Its set gives rise to levels, which in turn make up the scenes, to finally obtain sequences.

Inner Speech

Inner speech is a technique that came about due to contemporary psychoanalysis.

Interior Monologue

In an interior monologue, the character takes on the narrative discourse, verbalizing the mental contents of the character, allowing the author to directly enter inside.

Soliloquy

A soliloquy corresponds to a reflection of the character aloud, emphasizing the events circulating, to the detriment of their own image. It assumes a dialogical relationship between the character and their speech or an imagined being.

Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary fiction often deals with realism, disclosing real aspects of everyday life (e.g., Marta Brunet’s “Montaña Adentro”, Baldomero Lillo’s “Subterra”).

Magic Realism

Magic Realism is a way of representing reality, authenticating the narrative, and the cultural reality: space, character, time of the fictional universe, conflict resolution, and compositional procedures.

Basic Structure of Discourse

Discourse is divided into:

  • Introduction (Exordium)
  • Development
  • Conclusion (Peroratio)

Exordium

An exordium is an invitation to respect or listen to the speech, introducing the item.

Development

In the development, the issue is explored in depth or analyzed, depending on the intention.

Conclusion

The conclusion presents the largest single idea you want to claim, depending on the development, to strengthen it.

Characteristics of Magic Realism

  1. Mode of representation of reality: The natural and supernatural mix without being problematic.
  2. Narrative authenticity: The narrator authenticates basic facts by presenting them as natural.
  3. Cultural reality and space: A cosmopolitan atmosphere links it to the European and nationalist spirit. It is contextualized in a Latin American, rural space, with indigenous elements, and communication between the mythical, telluric, and collective beliefs of mixed-race people.
  4. Character: Focuses on the individual, but the collectivity is involved.
  5. Universe of fiction: A confusing and ambiguous, yet harmonious and coherent world, where the rational and the irrational coexist.
  6. Time: Presented as extraordinary, overcoming temporary dimensions, with problematic characters (time travel and disjunctive temporal elements) and inventions related to the mythical and the sacred.
  7. Resolution of conflict: Scientific explanation leads to several solutions. Conflict is resolved through verisimilitude in this type of story, “since it is based on narrative faith.”
  8. Compositional procedure:
    • Fantastic: Predominant elements of graphic resources, emphasis on paradoxes, and linguistic modalities.
    • Magical realism: Rhetorical resources such as hyperbole and naturalization of wonder.
  9. The reader and discursive effect:
    • Fantastic: Disturbs us with the strange world that occurs due to the conflicting blend of planes.
    • Magical realism: Affects the reader unquestioningly with wonderful reality, in a kind of spell by the narrative.
  10. Compositional procedure:
    • Fantastic: Moralizing techniques, resources, graphics, paradoxes (a figure of speech that has to do with the level of semantics).
    • Magical realism: Hyperbole, exaggeration, naturalization of wonder, etc.