hie relevent is the work of Propp and Levi-Strauss to the study of cinema cinema

This essay will focus on the different approaches to narrative structure employed by folklorist, Vladimir Propp and anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss to see if they can be applied to the study of narrative cinema.
In his book, Morphology of the Folktale, 1928, Vladimir Propp analysed a group of Russian folk-tales in order to see if they all shared common structural features. As the title suggests he ‘breaks down the tales according to its component parts - which he calls ‘functions’, and studies the relationship of the components to each other and to the whole’ (ibid:19-20).
Propps first conclusion found that no matter how widely the tales differed in their surface details they all shared common structural properties. ‘The most basic of these were the functions of various sets of characters and actions within the tales’ (Turner:1999:79). Propp maintain that the characters should be categorised not by their looks r virtues but by the task they performed. He outlined e...