Begiebing
illustrates the point when she says good labels raise questions
and get people thinking. The voice telling the story makes
a great difference. First-person encourages the reader,
audience, or visitor to the museum to listen and relate
to a person, the speaker, not just to the recitation of
facts.
An example of a first-person story is The
Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is also a third
person perspective in which the main character is seen from
the outside and the inside at the same time, heightening
the readers involvement in the story. Mixes of viewpoints
and voices assist in telling extremely complex stories.
Franco says it this way. Audience research has shown that
visitors are more willing to deal with difficult topics
in exhibitions if they are given multiple viewpoints and
are able to hear different sides. Addressing the unfamiliar
is one way to foster critical engagement, says Joshua Brown,
filmmaker and historian.
A good storyteller gives the listener or
reader a sense of making order out of chaos. So the good
storyteller must give the reader a good dose of feeling
the chaos, and there has to follow enough order made out
of the chaos to give the reader the satisfaction of a good
story. However, the stories that appeal to generation after
generation are the stories that are never resolvable - just
as life is never resolvable; the complexity of life remains.
Life is non-linear, says filmmaker David
Grubin. If life were linear, we would always live in the
present moment, but we don’t. At any moment, we live
in the past, partly in the present, and much in the future.
Life is non-linear. And the best films convey that non-linearity
of life in flashbacks and premonitions. Grubin tells his
own experience of trying to capture on film what it was
like to be Sigmund Freud. And Grubin's solution was to tell
the childhood of Freud toward the end of the film when Freud
is rehashing for himself the difficulties he had in creating
psychoanalysis. And in that moment of complexity in his
life, Freud reflects on the similar difficulties he had
in his childhood in getting people to accept him. In Grubin’s
estimation, Kurosawa similarly looked for non-linear storytelling
techniques when he approached the problem of telling in
Rashomon the very complex story of conflicting interests.
Four different people are involved in a murder. They have
different self-interests, and they have different stories
of what happened. It is all one film, but it is four different
stories with similar people and similar props in each of
the four stories.
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