Vladimir Propp (research)

Vladimir Propp was a Russian scholar who analysed plot components of Russian folk tales  to identify the narrative elements. His book 'Morphology of the Folk Tale' was published in Russian in 1928 depicted of 31 functions which were common in narrative structures. He used the breakdown of sentence structures to small elements which were easy to analyse and assess in Russian fairy tales. Examples of this were: VICTORY, STRUGGLE and GUIDANCE. 


GREEN DAY- 'BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
This depicts of the band walking along the road of a stranded neighbourhood that seems to have lost its happiness through times of war or global warming. The video is shown with a vintage effect to show how old the 'struggle' is. It denotes of people standing in the land is close up only showing the torso. They are seen to be wearing old, nasty-looking clothes which can connote that money is running in short supply. This video shows a narrative structure of 'struggle' as the lyrics describe of being alone in the world. For example, 'I walk this empty street on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. This is depicted in the video of the band walking across the empty land. Close-up images of the environment are shown persuading the audience to sympathise with the situation.  Since the Iraq war had started the year before, the war-stricken images could connote consequences of the war to a community and could represent other wars which have evolved in countries over disputes of land for example.