April 28th Lecture

"Duck Soup" seemed to be more about cheap jokes in each scene. Once the joke was over, the scene was over. There was definitely a narrative to it but not all the shots seemed to forward the story. There were scenes that didn't really push the story forward. For example, the scene where the two spys were playing pranks on the peanut stand guy. The scene was humorous but it didn't push the storyline forward. "The Way Things Go" was a narrative in its own way. It didn't have an obvious story to it, however if a narrative just means that there is a "logical sequence of incidents that take us from point A to point B", then the movie definitely had a narrative to it. You were not capable of getting from point A to point B without going through all the steps of the sequence. It was its own story because everything was connected. I would say these two films are similar because without all the fluff in the middle, you couldn't get the end product. In the "duck soup" film, all the gags seemed to come up later in the film after it had been introduced already. Everything had its way of tieing together to create more laughs. Using Frampton's formula, I would say that the film "Duck Soup" is mostly about the leader who made all the jokes (I cant remember his name, Rufus maybe?), and "The Way Things Go" would probably be about fire and the bottle rocket things they used, or just chemistry in general.