Johann N. Schmidt - Narration in Film
Johann N. Schmidt - Narration in Film
Johann N. Schmidt - Narration in Film
Johann N. Schmidt
1 Definition
The general proposition that there is no narrative without a narrator (
Narrator) poses particular problems when applied to narration in feature films (as
distinct from documentaries, etc.). Though almost all of these films, many of them
adaptations from literature, abound in storytelling capacities and thus belong to a
predominantly narrative medium, their specific mode of plurimedial presentation and
their peculiar blending of temporal and spatial elements set them apart from forms of
narrativity ( Narrativity) that are principally language-based. The narratological
inventory, when applied to cinema, is bound to incorporate and combine a large
number of co-creative techniques constructing the story world for specific effects
(Bordwell 1985: 12) and creating an overall meaning only in their totality. The
absence of a narrative subject is to be compensated for by the construction of a visual
narrative instance (Deleyto 1996: 219; Kuhn 2009) mediating the paradigms of
overtly cinematographic devices (elements relating to camera, sound, editing), the
mise-en-scne (arranging and composing the scene in front of the camera), and a
distinctly filmic focalization.
On the other hand, the most solid narrative link between verbal and visual
representation is sequentiality, since literary and filmic signs are apprehended
consecutively through time, mostly (though not always) following a successive and
causal order. It is this consecutiveness that gives rise to an unfolding structure, the
diegetic whole (Cohen 1979: 92). The main features of narrative strategies in
literature can also be found in film, although the characteristics of these strategies
differ significantly. In many cases, it seems to be appropriate to speak of
equivalences between literary and filmic storytelling and to analyze the pertinent
differences between the two media in narrative representation. These equivalences are
far more complex than is suggested by any mere translation or adaptation from
one medium into another.
2 Explication
Broadly speaking, there are two different outlooks on cinema that divide the
main camps of narratological research. If the medium itself and its unique laws of
formal representation ( Narration in Various Media) serve as a starting-point (as it is
the case in the course of this article), many of its parameters either transcend or
obscure the categories that have been gained in tracking narrative strategies of literary
texts. Thus Metz states that film is not a language but another kind of semiotic
system with articulations of its own (Chatman 1990: 124). Though some of the
equivalences between literary and filmic narrative may be quite convincing (the
neutral establishing shot of a panoramic view can be easily equated with external
focalization or even zero focalization), many other parallels must necessarily abstract
from a number of diverse principles of aesthetic organization before stating
similarities in the perception of literature and film. Despite the fact that adapting
literary texts into movies has long since become a conventional practice, the
variability of cinematographic modes of narrative expression calls for such a number
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of subcategories that the principle of generalization (inherent in any valid theory)
becomes jeopardized.
If, however, narratological principles sensu stricto move to the fore of
analysis, the question of medial specificity seems to be less important. Narratologists
of a strongly persistent stance regret that connotations of visuality are dominant even
in terms like point of view ( Perspective - Point of View) and focalization (
Focalization), and they maintain that the greatest divide between verbal and visual
strategies is in literature, not in film (Brtsch 2011). They hold that narratological
categories in film and literary studies differ much less than most scholars would
suggest. Since Genettes model presents a primarily narratological, transliterary
concept (albeit close to novel studies), mediality is seen as affecting narrative in a
number of important ways, but on a level of specific representations only. In general,
narrativity can be constituted in equal measure in all textual and visual media
(Fludernik 1996: 353).
The two approaches being given, they themselves depend on which scholarly
perspective is preferred: either how far narrative principles can be limited to questions
of narrativity alone, or whether the requirements of the medium are a conclusive
consequence for its narrative capacities.
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Both approaches ignore the plurimedial nature of cinema which draws on
multiple sources of temporal and spatial information and its reliance on the visual and
auditive senses. This peculiarity makes it difficult to sort out the various categories
that are operative in its narration. Like drama, it seems to provide direct perceptual
access to space and characters (Grodal 2005: 168); it is performed within a similar
frame of time and experienced from a fixed position. What Ingarden calls the views
and images [visuelle Ansichten] made concrete by actors and the scenery ([1931]
1972: 403) corresponds to the filmic mise-en-scne. Unlike drama, however, a film is
not produced in quasi-lifelike corporal subsequences, but its sequences are bound
together in a technically unique process (post-production) to conform to a very
specific perceptual and cognitive comprehension of the world (Grodal 2005: 169).
Similar to literary narration, it can influence the viewing positions of the recipient and
dispose freely of location and temporal sequences as long as it contains generic
signals of shifts in time and space ( Space).
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effects, arranged tableaux, and sensationalist trick scenes. What was then perceived as
the only striking narrative device consisted in showing these scenes within a framed
space and against the common laws of temporal continuity. But on the whole, these
movies were still very much indebted to the 19th-century apparatus in which the
process of seeing as a perceptual and motoric element was closely connected with precinematic spatial and bodily experiences (Elsaesser 1990: 3).
This early cinema of attractions (Gunning 1986) gradually made way for
narrativization (233) from 1907 to about 1913 through the process of structural
organization of cinematic signifiers and the creation of a self-enclosed diegetic
universe (233). The result, initiated by David Wark Griffith in particular, was an
institutional mode of representation, also known as classical narration
(Schweinitz 1999: 74). The filmic discourse was to create a coherence of vision
without any jerks in time or space or other dissonant and disruptive elements in the
process of viewing. The basic trajectory of the classical Hollywood ideal (also taken
over by UFA and other national film industries) involves establishing a cause-andeffect logic, a clear subject-object relation, and a cohesive effect of visual and auditive
perception aimed at providing the story with an organic meaning, however different
the shots that are sliced together might be. A seamless and consecutive style serves
to hide all marks of artifice (Chatman 1990: 154) and to give the narrative the
appearance of a natural observing position. The real of the cinema is founded at
least as much in the real-image quality of its photography as it is in the system of
representation that shows analogies to the viewers capacity to combine visual
impressions with a story.
Modernist cinema and non-canonical art films, especially after 1945, repudiate
the hegemonistic story regime of classical Hollywood cinema by laying open the
conditions of mediality and artificiality or by employing literary strategies not as an
empathetic but as an alienating or decidedly modern factor of storytelling. They
disrupt the narrative continuum and convert the principle of succession into one of
simultaneity by means of iteration, frequency (e.g. Kurosawas Rashomon, 1950,
repeating the same event from different angles as in internal multiple focalization),
and dislocation of the traditional modes of temporal and spatial representation (e.g.
Resnais Lanne dernire Marienbad, 1960). In each of these films, there is an
ever-widening gap between fabula and discourse. Modern cinema also made possible
the flash-forward as the cinematographic equivalent of the prolepsis (e.g. Loseys The
Go-Between, 1970), used jump cuts (e.g. Godards bout de souffle, 1959) and nonlinear collage elements, or broke with the narrative convention of character continuity,
as when a central protagonist disappears in the course of events (Antonionis
LAvventura, 1959). All of these assaults on traditional narrativity nevertheless
depend upon narrativity [or our assumptions about it; J.N.S.] and could not function
without it (Scholes 1985: 396).
Postclassical cinema, responding to growing globalization in its world-wide
distribution and reception, enhances the aesthetics of visual and auditory effects by
means of digitalization, computerized cutting techniques, and a strategy of immediacy
that signals a shift from linear discourse to a renewed interest in spectacular incidents.
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strategic points in space (angle, perspective). The most prominent examples in the
early history of filmic narrativization are: (a) the simple cut from one scene to
another, thus eliminating dead time by splitting the actual footage (ellipsis); (b) crosscutting, which alternates between shots of two spaces, as in pursuit scenes; (c) parallel
montage to accentuate similarity and opposition; (d) the shot-reverse-shot between
two persons talking to each other; (e) the cut-in, which magnifies a significant detail
or grotesquely distorts certain objects of everyday life.
Continuity editing (or analytic montage) aims primarily at facilitating
orientation during transitions in time and space. One basic rule consists in never
letting the camera cross the line of action (180-degree rule), thus respecting
geometrical orientation within a given space.
Narrative devices not only obey cognitive storytelling practices, but also
reflect a certain vision of the world. Whereas continuity editing presupposes a holistic
unity in a world which is temporarily in conflict but finally homogenized (not only
plot-wise, but via sensory connection with the audiences preferred viewing),
jzentejns collision editing accentuates stark formal and perceptual contrasts to
create new meanings or unusual metaphorical links (Grodal 2005: 171). For other
directors (e.g. Pudovkin), narration in film concentrates not on events being strung
together in chronological sequence, but on the construction of powerful situations and
significant details presented in an antithetical manner of association. Internal
editing, as advocated by Andr Bazin, avoids visible cuts and creates deep focus
(depth of field), making foreground, middle ground, and background equally sharp,
thus establishing continuity in the very same take.
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modulation of the visual impact through creating a sonic dcor or sonic space.
Language, noises, electronic sounds and music, whether intradiegetic or (like most
musical compositions) extradiegetic, help not only to define the tonality, volume,
tempo and texture of successive situations, but also to orchestrate and manipulate
emotions and heighten the suggestive expressivity of the story. Sound can range from
descriptive passages to climactic underlining and counterpointing what is seen. Again,
what was once considered as a complete break with narrative rules has become a
convention, so that when off-camera sounds are used before the scene they are related
to, they serve as a springboard between sequences.
As Elsaesser & Hagener point out, there is a potential dissociation between
body and voice as well as between viewing and hearing which can be used for comic
purposes, but which also stands in the service of narration (2007: 17273). A voice
may have a specific source in the diegetic space, although separate from the images
we see (voice-off), or it can be heard beyond the diegetic limits (voice-over).
New technologies such as multi-track sound with high digital resolution (e.g. Dolby
Surround) negate the directional coherence of screen and sound source, thus leading
to tension between the aural and the visual. Whereas the image can be fixed, the
sound derives its existence from the moment when it is perceived.
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that exist between film and dream, hallucination, and desire as important
undercurrents of the realist surface. Feminist theories dealt with the gendered gaze
that is applied not only in the film itself, but is also cast on the film by the viewer,
thus creating a conflict between voyeurism and subjugation to the power of images.
Studies of popular culture, finally, examined the functioning of cinematic discourse
within a wider cultural communicative process which is conveyed by a host of visual
signs.
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and acoustic information. The invisible observer theory even maintains that it is the
camera that narrates (the French director Alexandre Astruc coined the famous phrase
camra stylo). Deleyto (1996: 217) rejects this view, drawing on the conventional
distinction between narrator (who speaks?) and focalizer (who sees?) although,
unlike Bordwell, he does not grant the external focalizer the option of occupying the
position of the camera. He rather contends that whereas in the novel the two kinds of
focalization (internal/external) alternate, in film several internal and external
focalisers can appear simultaneously at different points inside or outside the frame, all
contributing to the development of the narrative and the creation of a permanent
tension between subjectivity and objectivity (217). A case in point is the objective
presentation of external narration to make internal processes both visible and
understandable. Even in voice-over narration, the figural and auditive representation
of the narrator is soon forgotten in favor of the virtual position of an impersonal
narrative instance. The few experimental films that construct events through the
eyes of the main character (e.g. Montgomerys The Lady in the Lake, 1947), thus
creating an unmediated presence by means of internal ocularization, make the viewer
painfully aware of the impersonal and subjectless apparatus of the camera which
alienates them from the character rather than drawing them into his ways of seeing
and feeling.
3.3.1 Viewpoints
Point of view (POV) clearly becomes the prime starting point for narratology
when applied to film. Though it has been defined as a concrete perceptual fact linked
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to the camera position (Grodal 2005: 168), its actual functions in narrative can be far
more flexible and multifarious than this definition suggests. As Branigan states in his
landmark study on narrative comprehension in cinema, point of view can best be
understood as organizing meaning through a combination of various levels of
narration which are defined by a dialectical site of seeing and seen or, more
specifically, the mediator and the object of our gaze (1984: 47). Branigan offers a
model of seven levels of narration which is based on Genettes study of focalization
and allows for constant oscillation between these levels, from extra-/heterodiegetic
and omniscient narration to adapting the highly subjective perception of a character.
Fulton speaks of a multiple focalisation that is realized by different camera angles,
which position us to see the action from a number of different viewpoints (2005:
114). Yet there are many more focusing strategies which select and control our
perception as well as our emotional involvement such as deep-focus, the length and
scale of a shot, specific lighting, etc. The prerequisite for any POV analysis, however,
is the recognition that everything in cinema consists of looks: the viewer looks at
characters who look at each other, or s/he looks at them, adopting their perspective of
the diegetic world while the camera frames a special field of seeing, or the viewer is
privileged to look at something out of the line of vision of any of the characters. Thus
the very question Who sees? involves a categorization of different forms of POV
that organize and orient the narrative from a visual and spatial standpoint and that also
include cognitive processes based on a number of presuppositions about a proper
perspective, not to speak of auditory information.
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narrative techniques. Though narratology possesses tools for analyzing these shifts,
the categories used for film analysis seem to be far more complicated than those
employed for literary narration.
5 Bibliography
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