User:Astrid van Nimwegen/Vladimir Propp

Morphology of the folktale - Vladimir Propp (1928)

If you can extract and grasp the ‘rules’ - conditions out of your own workingproces by reflecting upon and ‘reading’ your images, you are able to adapt those rules in every new work and by this consciousness of your own methodology you must be able to develop it further and take the work onto a higher level.

How can we extract those rules/functions in our own workmethods?

Can we search for the same patterns/structure in other situations where we use structural methods (other then the workpractice) and how do we recognize them? (And is the life structure and work structure in fact not the same if we analyze this thoroughly?)

Is this system of ‘functions’ individual/personal or universal and culturally determined?

Can Propp’s method be used to decipher film with these same set of functions or do we need other functions?

Eisenstein also talks about functions in film: ‘within formalism, and in particular Eisenstein’s cinematic structuralism, “meaning” is produced through the fact that every sign functions within a certain timely structure. Shots now become only functions’ Films and dreams-Bergman, Tarkovsky Sukarov, Kubrich and Wong Kar-Wai, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein chapter one p.4

Can we adapt Propp’s rules into cinema??

Quotes from ‘Morphology of the folktale’ - Vladimir Propp (1928):

‘Thus the functions of the dramatis personae are basic components of the tale, and we must first of all extract them. In order to extract the functions we must define them.’ Chapter2 ‘The method and Material’ p.8

‘The meaning which a given function has in the course of action must be considered.’ Chapter2 ‘The method and Material’ p.8

‘Thus, identical acts can have different meanings, and vice versa. Function is understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.’ Chapter2 ‘The method and Material’ p.8

'The sequence of elements, as we shall see later on, is strictly uniform.' 1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.

2. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited.

3. The sequence of functions is always identical.

4. All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.

Chapter2 'The method and Material' p.9/10