Overview
How are we still affected by this essay from over 2000 years ago? How is the Poetics useful? How is it not?
Review the Power Point for Aristotle's Poetics.
Pay Particular attention to the order in which the importance of play constructions is spelled out by the Ancient Greek teacher. The order of Poetics and their six part structure could not have been any more important for Aristotle.
Over the centuries that the essay has been written, many playwrights and storytellers have broken from this method of play structure but you can always see the six elements within any story when we look. This includes television and film.
It is important that we begin to see how film, Theatre and TV, tend to fall into categories that help us engage with that storytelling medium. As we move through the course of our semester we will see how understanding Genre, Style and Poetics as an approach help us gain a fuller insight into what our film-makers, play-makers and storytellers want to us receive and react to when they tell their stories. In this way tragedy, cultural background, sociopolitical, class, race, relationship issues can be raised and addressed in a clearer way.
For this exercise you are to choose 5 favorite films of yours and decide how each movie is arranged with the main six categories that Aristotle gives us. Why do those movies arrange in the order that it does? What about the nature of the storytelling tells you that this movie is a plot driven movie, a character driven movie, an idea movie, a story that is about the language, a story that is rooted and driven with music or a story that is driven by its spectacle.