Narrative

Linear Narrative
This is when a narrative has a beginning, middle and end in that order. In traditional cinema it is considered mainstream to use this narrative. Perhaps this is because it makes the story easier to follow and people don't struggle to follow the story, they can just sit back and absorb the film without thinking about it.  An example of a feature film doing this is "Memento" an American art house neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film itself has a nonlinear, disjointed, or disrupted narrative, making it similar to a puzzle. This structure makes it hard to follow, but is also effective in helping us understand the character. Leonard, the protagonist, suffers from anterograde amnesia, a form of short-term memory loss, which impairs his ability to store new explicit memories, who has developed a system for recollection using hand-written notes, tattoos, and photos. With the narrative reflecting how Leonard sees his memories, it puts the audience in the same situation as him, allowing them to connect with his character. While this is a feature film and not a short film, I can still see how narrative can be used in short films. 

Fight Club (1999)

Fight Club had a completely different narrative as it's ending of the story is shown at the beginning of the film, much like in the popular "Hangover Trilogy". This is an uncommon narrative which does make the narrative sometimes more interesting but for some audiences it can spoil the whole plot. While intriguing, as it keeps the audience guessing, it does show where the story ends up. This can take away some of the mystery of where the story is heading, but does still invoke ideas about the journey of how a sequence of events lead up to that point. Of course, the ending shown at the beginning needs to be very interesting to make the audience interested in finding out why/how it happened.

Fight Clubs storyline consists of a ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channels his primal male aggression into a changing his life and creating a new form of therapy. The concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town, until an eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.
The trailer is below:

The Narrative of Short Films 

"Spider", is a short film directed by Nash Edgerton, which uses a linear narrative.The film takes place in real-time, except for one fade, in which an ambulance arrives. With no disruptions to the narrative the story is easy to follow. and understand. As the audience, we don't have to think about the order of the film, leaving us to appreciate it's simplicity and entertaining narrative. Some ways in which the narrative is made simple is the use of mise-en-scene, this portrays obvious signs about the narrative including emotion. At the beginning of the film we learn that the female is clearly annoyed with the other character, we know this because camera angles are close on her expressions, this helps to show she's angry but also her speech is very short and snappy, also helping to emphasise her feelings to the audience.

The short film is below: