Narrative and Narration, by Warren Buckland

PREFACE

In Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) the hero, Jeff, is confined to his wheelchair looking out of his window at his neighbors. Except in a few significant scenes, the camera remains attached to Jeff’s awareness and visual experience of the story’s events. This means that the spectator’s access to the story is restricted, for it is filtered through the consciousness of one character. One night he hears a scream from an apartment occupied by his neighbor (Thorwald) and his wife; he later sees Thorwald leaving and returning to his apartment several times, carrying a large case. The spectator experiences these events from Jeff’s perspective. But in the early morning Jeff falls asleep; the camera then pans from the sleeping Jeff across the courtyard and shows Thorwald and a woman leaving the apartment; the camera then pans back to Jeff, still asleep. This is a moment of omniscient narration, a form of storytelling that places spectators in a position of superiority over the main character. In this moment in Rear Window, spectators are given more story information than Jeff—of Thorwald leaving the apartment with a woman.

When nurse Stella turns up, Jeff tells her he thinks Thorwald has murdered his wife and has disposed of her body, and provides the clues (screams, Thorwald’s comings and goings with a large case). Up to the moment Jeff falls asleep, spectators make the same inferences, for they share the same story information. But when Jeff falls asleep, spectators see what Jeff does not see—Thorwald leaving the apartment with a woman.

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From that moment in the film, spectators think differently from Jeff because of the additional information they have. Jeff’s detective friend Doyle becomes involved, and eventually discovers the same piece of information, and tells Jeff that Thorwald was seen leaving the apartment with a woman and took her to the train station, while Thorwald returned to the apartment. Doyle then reinterprets the events as a domestic dispute, and the characters and spectator alike are encouraged to assume that the woman who left the apartment was Mrs. Thorwald. Only toward the end of the film do the characters and spectators discover it was not Mrs. Thorwald leaving the apartment, but instead was Mr. Thorwald’s new love interest, and Thorwald did after all murder his wife, cut up her body, and carry it out of the apartment in his case.

This book presents the thesis that the success or failure of a film such as Rear Window is determined by the effectiveness of its storytelling. The theory presented in the following chapters identifies the basic components of cinematic storytelling across several filmmaking practices and explains how they contribute, either singly or in combination, to a film’s overall design. However, making a successful film is not simply a matter of using a particular storytelling component or not. Instead, a film’s success is determined by how it creates a well-formed narrative structure and the way it limits and discloses that narrative to spectators. A film with popular stars, famous directors, and high production values can still fail if its storytelling components are not well formed—if they do not effectively contribute to the film’s overall design.

But well-formedness is not the whole story. All theories of storytelling go beyond the immediate surface of films and identify the underlying components and structures that make them meaningful. While certain components of storytelling simply shape films into a pleasing aesthetic pattern, creating a sense of unity, balance, and coherence, other components organize films through oppressive ideological values—patriarchy, racism, inequality, homophobia. Remaining on the surface will not lead to an adequate understanding of ideology nor will it inspire screenwriters (and storytellers more generally) to challenge and replace it with an alternative.

This is why theories that identify the underlying components of storytelling and expose their ideological values are fundamental to the study of filmmaking.

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The terminology used to study storytelling is notoriously complex and contradictory. But the terminology is less important than the conceptual distinctions the terms try to identify. Robert Burgoyne provides some clarification when he asserts that “narrative analysis . . . distinguishes such elements as story outline and plot structure, the roles played by the characters or actors, the way narrative information is channelled through point of view, and the relationship of the narrative discourse to the inhabitants and events of the fictional world” (1990, 3). More specifically, theoreticians of narrative make the following conceptual distinctions: 1. a chronological sequence of character-centered actions and events; 2. the rearrangement or reorganization of those actions and events; 3. agents (narrators, authors, and enunciators) who control the spectator’s access to the sequence of actions and events; and 4. the manifestation of actions, events, and agents in a particular medium.

These distinctions form the core of this book and are introduced in part 1: “The Basics.” A sequence of character-centered actions and events is a product or object, and is called a variety of names, including “narrative” or “story.” Chapter 2 focuses on the seminal work of Vladimir Propp (1968), Umberto Eco (1979), and Peter Wollen (1982), who reduce narrative to its system of preexisting elements and their rules of combination. This work is independent from any specific practice of filmmaking; it not only enables film scholars to identify the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema, to define it as the dominant mode of filmmaking, but also assists in identifying and defining the strategies of alternative filmmaking practices.

The process that rearranges narrative and filters it through the characters and narrators is usually called “narration” or “plot.” Its function is threefold: to reorganize narrative actions, to control spectators’ access to those actions, and to filter those actions through characters and narrators.

These three aspects of narration are discussed in chapter 3 and illustrated with examples from Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014), beDevil (Tracey Moffat, 1993), and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993).

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A key component of narration is the narrative agent. A narrative agent (such as a narrator, an author, or enunciator) controls the process of narration and its manifestation in a medium. A film will either attempt to conceal its narrative agent and process of production/enunciation, as is typical of classical films, or draw attention to that process, making the film reflexive (chapter 4).

Film manifests narrative and narration via a specific combination of materials of expression—techniques such as camera placement and movement, shot framing, lighting, editing, and sound design. These techniques are discussed throughout the book. Although narrative and narration are generally regarded as independent of media, “narration” is sometimes defined as a combination of narration and medium-specific techniques.

The book opens with a brief discussion of the emergence of narrative, narration, and narrative agents in early cinema (chapter 1). It aims to demonstrate how filmic space and time are manipulated in order to narrate stories and to absorb spectators into a film’s fictional world.

Part 2, “Types of Storytelling,” employs and develops the concepts presented in part 1 to examine specific practices of narrative cinema.

Rather than present a complete, definitive survey of film narrative across the entire history of cinema from around the world, this part identifies a handful of significant trends prominent in the current cinematic landscape: the issue of feminist narratives and women filmmakers (chapter 5); the continuing importance of art cinema as a niche film practice (chapter 6); the emergence of a distinct mode of storytelling based on unreliable narration and puzzle plots (chapter 7); and the development of a small group of films influenced by videogame logic (chapter 8). These specific case studies show how to identify and analyze any filmmaking practice from a storytelling perspective.

As well as presenting theories of narrative, narration, and narrative agents, this book introduces a set of methods. A method offers a framework to guide film analysis. Methods are important because they act as a constant reference point—a set of standard, shared practices—that guides the analysis of a particular film or sequence of film. Following a method also informs the reader exactly how the film analysis was carried out and how the results were achieved. Referring to theories and methods therefore makes the analysis of film an open and reflexive process. Furthermore, each theory and its method necessarily examine one aspect of film

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while eliminating other aspects. This is not a weakness; instead, it makes the research focused.

This book attempts to demonstrate that narrative, narration, and narrative agents are fundamental both to the cinema and to the study of cinema. Some of the many key books and essays I draw from include (in alphabetical order): Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film (2000) David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992) Nick Browne, The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration (1982) Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) Teresa de Lauretis’s seminal essay “Desire in Narrative” (in 1984, 103–57) Thomas Elsaesser’s essays on Hollywood written in the 1970s and 1980s, collected in The Persistence of Hollywood (2012) André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière (2009) Stephen Heath’s essay “Narrative Space” (1976) Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (1988) Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1974) George M. Wilson, Narration in Light (1986), and Peter Wollen’s essays collected in part 1 of Readings and Writings (1982).

More recent general approaches to narrative and narration include Kristin Thompson’s Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999) and Peter Verstraten’s Film Narratology (2009).

In addition, a series of books presents narrowly focused theories of specific aspects of film: the emergence of narrative in early cinema (see chapter 1); point of view (Edward Branigan’s Point of View in the Cinema [1984]); film suspense (Vorderer, Wulff, and Friederichsen’s Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations [1996]); complex storytelling, including puzzle films and mind-game films (Buckland 2009, 2014; Cameron 2008; Elsaesser 2018; Hven 2017; Kiss and Willemsen 2017; Littschwager 2019); postclassical narration (Eleftheria

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Thanouli’s Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration [2009b]); female characters in contemporary narrative cinema (Hilary Neroni’s The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence In Contemporary American Cinema [2005], Agnieszka Piotrowska’s The Nasty Woman and The Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema [2019]); the study of film narrative through the orality-literacy paradigm (Sheila J. Nayar’s Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative [2010]); the role of music (Guido Heldt’s Music and Levels of Narration in Film [2013]); and numerous books on film, cognition, and emotion, including Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson’s Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images (2007), Nitzan Ben-Shaul’s Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies (2012), Kathrin Fahlenbrach’s Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches (2018), Carl Plantinga’s Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (2018), Greg M. Smith’s Film Structure and the Emotion System (2003), Murray Smith’s Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (1995), Ed Tan’s Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film (1996), and Peter Wuss’s Cinematic Narration and Its Psychological Impact: Functions of Cognition, Emotion and Play (2009).

In this book I can only engage with a fraction of this rich array of scholarship. But the existence of an extensive range of assorted theories and methods demonstrates the significance film scholars attach to the study of storytelling across numerous filmmaking practices, from classical and contemporary Hollywood to art cinema, puzzle films, and feminist cinema.

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SHORT CUTS NARRATIVE AND NARRATION ANALYZING CINEMATIC STORYTELLING

“A masterful summary of the discoveries that have made narrative theory one of the most intellectually powerful paradigms in film studies. One of the great pleasures in reading Warren Buckland’s clear and concise book are the acute analyses he provides of a range of popular films, readings that illustrate the strengths of the method—and the strengths of the author. Genuinely illuminating.”

ROBERT BURGOYNE, AUTHOR OF THE HOLLYWOOD HISTORICAL FILM

“Buckland’s book encompasses a vast array of issues concerned with film narration. It expounds principal theories, the most pervasive narrative modes in the history of cinema, basic notions and categories, as well as providing exemplary analyses of carefully chosen films. Lucid, concise, and competent, Narrative and Narration constitutes a perfect introduction to the field.”

MIROSLAW PRZYLIPIAK, UNIVERSITY OF GDANSK

“Narrative and Narration provides a brilliant survey of a tricky and sometimes confusing field. Buckland covers an extensive range of concepts and approaches to narrative and narration, while also clearly defining the differences between these terms. Excellent cinematic examples are utilized, and the book is written with a precision that makes difficult concepts easy to understand.”

RICHARD RUSHTON, AUTHOR OF DELEUZE AND LOLA MONTÈS

WARREN BUCKLAND is reader in film studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Film Studies: An Introduction, 5th ed. (2015); Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2009); and Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (2006).

THE SHORT CUTS SERIES is a comprehensive list of introductory texts covering the full spectrum of film studies, specifically designed for building an individually styled library for all students and enthusiasts of cinema and popular culture.

ISBN: 978-0-231-18143-3

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FILM STUDIES

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