Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

24.4 Narration
Unit 24 Film and prose fiction
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

This basic distinction between words and images is an important point of difference between the two media. Indeed, the differences between film and prose fiction can seem to reduce to a long-established distinction in the study of narrative between ’showing’ (mimesis), on the one hand, and ’telling’ (diegesis) on the other. It has even been suggested that narrative film can be thought of as ’story’ without the level of narration - a tale without a teller. In what follows, however, it is suggested that film can be thought of as a narrative medium - even though the medium through which narration is accomplished is quite different from that of prose.

Despite the differences between them, some important points of resemblance between film and prose fiction remain. These resemblances are best revealed in terms of narration. In the first place, the claim that film is a nonnarrated medium is one that is difficult to sustain. For one thing it is not uncommon for the soundtrack of a film to include elements of voice-over narration (as, for instance, in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now(1979) or Trainspotting(1995)). More significantly and more persuasively, however, the way in which film is shot and edited together to construct a coherent and intelligible story follows certain basic conventions, amounting to codes of narration, or routine ways of telling, even when a personalized narrator is not evident. Film is not a completely transparent ’window’ on the world of the tale: the film image should not be confused with reality. Despite their iconicity, film images are still ’signs’, in that they recall or resemble a segment of reality elsewhere, without being that reality itself. Moreover, the significance of a film image always exceeds what it literally depicts or denotes. This broader significance has many aspects, and is conferred on the image in the following ways:

1 An image supplied by a shot derives significance from its place in series of shots. This is the classical principle of ’montage’ (see Unit 12, Juxtaposition) in which the sequential juxtaposition of one shot with another produces significance that goes beyond what can be traced to the individual shots themeselves.

2 In mainstream cinema, the image is constantly supplemented by sound. Contemporary cinema typically uses immensely complex, multilayered soundtracks, which interweave several different types of sound, including music (e.g. ’motifs’), ambient or diegetic sound (e.g. traffic, rattling teacups), and voice/speech (both as character dialogue and voice-over narration).

The organization and sequencing of shots - especially in commercial cinema - are themselves subject to powerful conventions. In the presentation of dialogue in the fictional film it is rare for characters to address the camera; rather, they are filmed in various degrees of profile addressing each other. This is such a binding convention that ’the look to camera’ might almost be described in film terms as ’the forbidden look’. When it does occur, it typically breaks the illusion of naturalism. It is more common in art cinema (in films by Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman, for example, or Sally Potter’s film Yes (2003)) than in mainstream cinema, though it may be found occasionally in popular television drama series (e.g. Glenn Gordon Caron’s Moonlighting, 1985-9, Channel 4’s Sex and the City, 1999, or BBC 2’s Rab C. Nesbitt, 1992-9).

The practice of filming dialogue in profile is part of a larger set of conventions built up around an important organizing principle: the line of action. In its simplest form, for a scene involving two protagonists, this principle is based on an imaginary line drawn between the two characters. In mainstream cinema it is a basic convention to restrict consecutive shots in the same scene to only one side of this imaginary line. In theory, it might seem possible to set up shots from anywhere within a 360-degree circle around the space in which the filmed action occurs. In practice, however, shots are restricted to half this domain, in conformity with what then becomes known as ’the 180-degree rule’.

In shooting a scene involving dialogue, film-makers have available to them a standard repertoire of possible shots. The most common among these are mid-shots, medium close-ups and close-ups. At or near the beginning of a scene will occur a mid-shot, in which both characters figure, in order to establish the line of action (sometimes called a two-shot or an establishing shot.) As the dialogue proceeds, there will usually be a progressive focusing in on the individual protagonists, so that each is shown individually in close-up. At or near the end of a scene, a two-shot or mid-shot is often used as part of the process of bringing the scene to a close. Within the scene, then, the handling of close-ups is prepared for by the initial establishing shot, which gives the line of action. Subsequent chaining together of the close-ups develops in a form of visual counterpoint: a shot of one speaker is typically replaced by a shot of the other in a technique commonly known as ’field/reverse-field’ or ’shot/counter-shot’. In the clearest cases, the speaker is observed from a position nearby, to one side or behind the listener; the position is then reversed when the speaking roles switch, the camera remaining all the time on one side of the line of action. The repertoire and combination of shots amount to a set of conventions for making the events of the narrative intelligible. As a set of conventions they are comparable in some ways to showing and in some ways to telling. In the case of filmed dialogue, for example, they are analogous to (but clearly not the same as) the reporting clauses and other methods for the presentation of speech in fictional prose narratives. The sequence of stills in Figures 24.1-3, from David Lean’s film of A Passage to India (1978), helps to show these conventions at work.

These basic conventions are, of course, honoured as much in the breach as in the observance. They have evolved as routines that provide flexible formats for making what is seen on screen coherent and intelligible; but they are not adhered to in a rigid fashion. The shot/counter-shot does not always follow the speaker. Sometimes it includes the reactions of the listener, hence the term ’reaction shots’. Generally, however, these routines provide background norms of presentation that help guide the spectator through the time and space of the narrative on the basis of tacit knowledge of the conventions.

The notion that conventions help to supply or guarantee intelligibility is crucial here. Conventions cue us to expect certain kinds of relationship between shots so that, for instance, if in one shot we, the viewers, see a character gazing out of frame, we then interpret the next shot (whenever possible) as depicting what that character could see from the position he or she occupies. Such apparently simple mechanisms for chaining shots together help to situate us as viewers in the temporal and spatial world of the fiction, and to draw us through the narrative. In this way the ’eye’ of the camera, as reflected in the angle of shots and the way in which these shots are edited into sequence, is anthropomorphized, or made to seem human. As spectators, we see from positions that could be (and sometimes even are) those of protagonists in the fiction themselves.

It has been argued, in fact, that the position constructed for the film spectator (and the pleasures associated with being a spectator) resemble those of a voyeur - a claim that has been particularly discussed within feminist film theory, but that has also been made the subject of conscious attention by filmmakers themselves in films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1959) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). One significant aspect of the notion of the voyeuristic spectator is that the camera does not just show the action of the story, like some simple recording device. It shows events in a way that is so constructed, and edited according to specifiable conventions, that it amounts - if not exactly to a narrator - then to some anthropomorphically defined, implied spectator. Indeed, for a feminist film theorist such as Laura Mulvey (1975/1989), the eye of the camera is not merely anthropomorphic, but more specifically masculine, inasmuch as it routinely constructs women within cinema as objects of male desire (see Unit 15, Positioning the reader or spectator).