Comparison Of Tragedy In Aristotle's Poetics To Film

“Tragedy is one of the poetics arts. It is, Aristotle says, an imitative representation of a serious action, dramatically presented in a plot that is self-contained, complete, and unified.” (Rorty) Aristotle’s text Poetics is considered to be a guide to the fundamental idea of tragedy and the way it is supposed to function. This means tragedy in film, tragedy in theater and even tragedy in literature. This text is one that is used on multiple occasions to measure and rate other texts based on their quality. This method works quite well when viewed from a historical perspective. Dramatic films that do not include the principles suggested within Aristotle’s text tend to do the worst, while films that follow the guideline do the best. One example …show more content…
The complication and the denouement can both best be described within Tierno’s long essay, Application of Aristotle’s Poetics to Film “In cinematic terms, the complication includes everything that happens in the back story that pertains to the plot, and continues through the opening of the movie until right before the change in the hero’s fortune occurs . . . This change in fortune marks the beginning of the denouement and … continues until the last frame of the movie.” (Tierno) The complication is simply everything that occurs, including the backstory, up until the change in the hero’s fortune. The Denouement on the other hand is everything that occurs from the change in hero’s fortune to the last scene of the film. Within the film Grapes of Wrath from the very beginning we are given the backstory of our protagonist. The text opens with Tom Joad catching a ride to his house after having been released from prison. When he returns home to his family, those characters introduce us to the ideas of what precisely occurred to land him in prison, and what has been happening since then. Moving on from the backstory aspect of the text, this introduction continues on up until the last portion of the book, when the real change in fortune occurs, when Tom Joad accidently commits another murder while attempting to save his close …show more content…
Aristotle analyzed all of the popular theater available to him during that time period, and used it as a basis to form a theory on why these texts seem to become so incredibly popular. This was done in an age that is different from ours in almost any way, further proof that this idea of tragedy is nearly universal. The Joad family’s trip across the United States in search of a better life is a story that will continue to bring grief and pity upon all that take the time to view it. It is the kind of text that you can go back and watch multiple times simply because the fall of the hero is so incredibly capturing. Aristotle’s theory presented within Poetics is one that can be applied to almost all available films, and the predictions that are derived from that analysis will almost always be