NARRATION
Because film and literature are different mediums, they have different approaches to storytelling demanded by the constraints and values of their properties. At a fundamental level, literature relies on language, and film relies on visuals to communicate story information. There are other differences, of course, but most reflect this basic dichotomy. A crucial question in both mediums: how does each narrate the story?
In literature, the narration is layered. In one respect, the narration is done by the author of the novel or short story. The author is the person who has decided what the story is, who the characters are, what its big ideas or emotions are, and at the granular level, decided how many chapters there will be, what the pace of the story is, and, of course, which words appear on the page and in what order. This authorial narration controls everything about the way you, as a reader, perceive the story. You are free to bring your own interpretation of the story, certainly, but the actual words on the page do not change. They remain constant, the story narrated by the author’s control of language.
The author’s narration also governs point of view. I’ll return to this in a later post, because it demands a more substantive discussion. For now, be aware that the narration of a work of fiction takes place at the authorial level, but also within the story as that author makes decisions about which point of view the story is told from.
In film, narration is much harder to determine because unlike literature, cinema has a number of possible means by which it can tell a story. Author Christopher Williams offers some useful insight here, distinguishing cinematic narration from literary narration: “Film narrates, but there is no one person doing the narrating, nor is there one person receiving it, and the narration obeys complicated rules of its own. It shows ‘documents,’ but the documents are only indirectly linked to the realities they are supposed to document.” In literature, the narration comes through one mode: the words on the page. In cinema, not only is there no one person narrating, there are multiple means of narration. According to Robert Stam, “The film as ‘narrator’ is not a person (the director) or character in the fiction but, rather, the abstract instance or superordinate agency that regulates the spectator’s knowledge.”
Consider the difficulty of defining narration on film by thinking about a tool of cinematic storytelling for which there is no equivalent in literature: a film's opening credits. From the very start of a film, the various elements of cinema combine to create a narrational experience. Some directors overtly use the opening credits to establish the film's mood or ideas; text appears on screen, sometimes against images, sometimes against a black screen, but always, that text communicates something about the film you are about to see. Watch the commentary at right that features the opening credits sequence of The Commuter (2018, Collett-Serra), which begins narrating from the film's first moments using the credits.
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The primary mode of narration in cinema is the camera. Filmmakers make selections in the kinds of shots they use, and every aspect of the image is an act of narration. By choosing to show one image and not another, the film is narrating from a specific vantage point. Filmmakers choose to keep the camera stable or move it; they choose close-ups or wide shots; they choose what is in the frame and what isn’t. These images from Todd Haynes’s Carol (2016), based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith about a romantic relationship between two women in 1950s New York City, show how the camera narrates. In the image on the left, the shallow focus close-up of Carol (Cate Blanchett) isolates her from the background. In the image on the right, the wide shot and the staging of Carol in the phone booth obscures her and makes her call seem conspiratorial and secretive.
The camera is the main way that cinema narrates, but it’s not the only one; any cinematic convention can function as narrator. According to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, “narration can in fact draw upon any film technique as long as the technique can transmit story information. Conversations, figure position, facial expressions, and well-timed encounters between characters all function just as narrationally as do camera movements, cuts, or bursts of music.”
Consider some of the stylistic techniques that Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson identify as containing narrational capabilities. Dialogue between characters can of course convey story information, just as it might in literature. However, film has one thing that literature doesn’t: actors. The performers playing the roles not only speak the dialogue out loud, but narrate through the way their voices say the lines, how their faces react, and the way they carry their bodies. In the Coen Brothers’ 2007 crime-western No Country For Old Men, adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the actors bring considerable interpretation to the characters. The film’s world-weary sheriff is played by Tommy Lee Jones (pictured at left below), whose craggy face and tired, accented voice lend the character authenticity. On the other hand, the film’s villain, Anton Chigurh, is given a strange, alienating quality by Javier Bardem (pictured at right), whose haircut and unconventional facial expressions make him a terrifying mix of contradictions.
Music also plays an enormous role in narration. When filmmakers select music, whether it has been composed especially for the film or is a well-known popular song, they do so for specific purposes. Music guides emotion, perhaps more than any other single film element. The presence of John Williams’s iconic theme in Jaws (1975) signals to the audience the presence of the shark just as much as Steven Spielberg’s use of underwater photography. In fact, the film adheres to its own narrational rules late in the film, when two kids play a prank with a cardboard fin, pretending to be the shark and causing a panic on the beach. Spielberg offers the underwater camera, but withholds the Williams theme, indicating to astute viewers that the shark is not actually there; its music has not announced the threat. This is a narrational device that allows Spielberg to play fair—it would be a dirty trick if he used the music with the underwater camera and the shark turned out just to be the kids with the phony fin.
Editing also determines cinematic narration. It is tempting to think about cinema in terms of discrete shots, which communicate information, but the importance of editing reminds us that in film, meaning is accumulated across multiple shots. Though any one shot can carry ideas and communicate story, the chain of shots linked together by cuts is also an act of narration. Editing emphasizes relationships between separate shots, joining narrative information across them. If there is a literary equivalent, you might consider a cut from one shot to another to be something like a paragraph break in a work of fiction. A cut offers an opportunity to momentarily reset and adjust to new narrative information. The chain of shots below from William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1986), based on the novel by Gerald Petievich, demonstrate how film narrates.
In shot one, Treasury Agent Richard Chance (William Petersen) stands on a bridge. In shot two, taken from his point of view, we see the water and the ships in the distance. In shot three, the camera is below Chance looking up at him standing on the edge; in the same shot, the camera swoops up and behind him to look down. In shot four, taken from below and on Chance’s right, he leaps off the bridge. The bungee cord attached to his leg has been withheld (Chance, as his name implies, is a thrill-seeking daredevil) from the audience; Friedkin only reveals it in shot four, causing a moment of suspenseful misdirection. The camera’s framing and movements combine with editing across the four-shot sequence to create meaning and convey an emotion to the viewer.
Because so many different cinematic elements can function as narration, there can be a tendency towards chaos. If literature’s narration is relatively straightforward (read the words!), then cinematic narration runs the risk of becoming indecipherable. This chaotic tendency necessitated the establishment of rules and norms for on-screen storytelling, which filmmakers adopted in order to train audiences how to watch movies and understand what was happening clearly. Many of these norms were established in Classic Hollywood during the studio period from 1917-1960. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson describe some of these norms in action: “At the scene’s start, the classical paradigm offers two ways of establishing the space: immediate or gradual. The narration may begin with a long shot that establishes the total space; this is by far the most common method. […] Or the narration may begin the scene by showing only a portion of the space – a character, an object, a detail of décor, a doorway. In this alternative, the scene will begin by framing a detail and then by means of various devices (dissolve, cut, iris, or tracking shot) will soon reveal the totality of the space. The establishing shot is simply delayed, seldom eliminated.” In either case, the audience is able to understand through habituation how the film is narrating.
We have developed an intuitive understanding of film narration that makes complicated narrative structure easily digestible. Take flashbacks for an example. In 1940s Hollywood cinema, filmmakers began to rely much more overtly on flashback structure in their work. There are many examples of this: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is often cited, but many noir films, including Double Indemnity (1944, Wilder) and Mildred Pierce (1945, Curtiz, based on the novel by James M. Cain and pictured below), rely on a similar flashback structure. Their clarity of meaning is established through cinematic adherence to convention. You know what visual signifiers indicate a flashback is about to begin: a character begins to describe a series of past events; the camera pushes in on that character, settling in a close-up; music begins to rise, already anticipating the transition soon to follow; the image ripples and cross-fades to another shot, often an echo of the close-up the film has just left; the dialogue the character had been speaking on screen now becomes voice-over; we have moved from the present to the past in a few short seconds, guided by repeated, transparent techniques that maximize clarity and solidify our sense of when we are.
After norms like this are established, filmmakers can play with narrational convention in order to create a kind of confusion. In this respect, films can use their usual storytelling norms and audiences’ familiarity with them to create more challenging kinds of stories that foreground narration as a tool.
In the commentary at right, I explore how director John Frankenheimer distorts narrative convention in a scene from his 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, based on a novel by Richard Condon. In the scene, a group of American soldiers fighting the Korean War have been apprehended by the enemy and are subject to brainwashing. Frankenheimer uses narrational techniques to sow confusion and simulate the warping of realities.
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Films like The Manchurian Candidate demonstrate that once narrational rules are established, they can be broken by inventive filmmakers who know which conventions to break and how to do it.
clip quiz - narration
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
WAR HORSE (2011, Spielberg)
In this sequence from War Horse, a British cavalry unit makes a fateful charge at the German lines. How does the scene narrate information? How does it tell you what happens to the advancing horsemen? |
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TORSO (1973, Martino)
While cinema is an audiovisual medium, it contains many examples of what Hitchcock called “pure cinema,” which is narration that is almost purely visual. What are the individual acts of visual narration that occur in this scene from the slasher film Torso? |
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BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990, De Palma)
Some films use extremely long takes to narrate information. Without any cuts, this opening scene of Bonfire of the Vanities is one such film. What individual aspects of camera movement facilitate narration in this single shot? |
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APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Coppola)
This opening sequence of Apocalypse Now contains many different layers of narration. What different layers do you see and hear, and how do they interact with one another? Where do those layers of narration build on each other? |
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Narration in Point Blank
Based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake (who also wrote under the name Richard Stark), Point Blank (1968, Boorman) is a crime thriller with a very distinct feel. Using a strange, fractured approach to editing, director John Boorman creates a surreal experience that takes us inside the head of the criminal Walker (Lee Marvin) as he seeks vengeance against the crooks who robbed him and left him for dead. Boorman relies on a non-linear structure that fills the film with flashbacks—it is not always clear what is happening and, crucially, when it is happening. This is not poor editing—it is intentionally-created confusion.
Boorman relies on a variety of cinematic tools to narrate in the opening scene. The multiple uses of voice over, the cuts to past, present, and future, the music, and each individual shot are acts of cinematic narration. Above all, the idea that governs the first ten minutes of Point Blank is fracture. Walker’s memories flood the film, appearing in fragments, the bits and pieces of a life collected and repeated in his mind. From a narrational perspective, the opening ten minutes cover more than a year of story time, but Boorman’s fragmented execution gives us only what we need. The robbery carried out by Walker, his partner Mal (John Vernon), and wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) occurs in just a few shots, with the elaborate planning, execution, and dividing of the loot communicated very efficiently. Relationships are reduced to their essentials, with the only thing passing between Walker and Lynne being her betrayal of him. Boorman collapses the definition of a scene, expressing ideas in quick shots through repetition and singular images.
In the commentary at right, you can see the opening sequence of Point Blank, which follows a particular kind of dream logic that tilts into the surreal, expressing a variety of ideas across time and place, memory and hallucination, that illustrate the complexity of cinematic narration. It uses images, editing, sound, music, and more to create a fragmented impression of Walker’s experience of being double-crossed by his partner. As you watch the commentary, pay particular attention to how the film communicates information in unconventional ways.
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Contrast Boorman’s approach with the way these scenes might be conveyed in a work of literature. Images can express ideas instantaneously, giving the filmmaker freedom to move back and forth in time in a way that may challenge novelists, who risk confusing their readers with shifts in tense, or dramatic adjustments to time and place that are not overtly signaled. Certainly novelists have attempted this—William Faulkner is a notable example—but cinema can do it almost effortlessly. In the space of a few cuts, we pick up the fragmented pattern that Boorman establishes in the film’s opening sequence, which guides our understanding of the rest of the film. Though few sequences of Point Blank are as expressionistic as its first one, we are more or less prepared for anything to happen because it is so daring in its cinematic narration. The film continues its commitment to fractured narration throughout; it defines nearly every shot, replete with fragmentations and disruptions.
Flashbacks in Point Blank are not so simple. Though we as audience members have been trained through habit to understand how filmmakers indicate the beginning of a flashback to us, we also take for granted some embedded signifiers of meaning indicated by a dissolve to the past. First of all, it is common for flashbacks to begin in dialogue as a character begins to tell a story. It is also quite common for that dialogue to become voice over narration as a bridge over the dissolve from present to past, demonstrating that the character’s language is now summoning these images onto the screen. However, it is just as common for the voice over to then drop away and leave the images as the only form of on screen narration. We accept this convention—the images substitute for the voice, replacing the auditory storytelling with the visual. However, the images communicate their information simultaneously: the human voice would have to describe each individual thing at a time, but the frame offers all the visual elements at once. We see whether it is night or day, sunny or cloudy, whether the street is in the city or the country, whether it appears to be cold or warm, and on and on.
Narration in cinema is complex because it tends towards confusion, owing to the sheer number of disparate elements that contain narrational capability. The camera, editing, music, sound, voice over, dialogue, and many other factors may contribute to narration. Learning to spot acts of narration and assign responsibility to them is a crucial aspect of reading cinema, especially as distinct from literature. In closing, let us return to Robert Stam, who offers a useful reminder about how film narration differs from its literary counterpart: “Film complicates literary narration by practicing two parallel and intersecting forms of narration: the verbal narration, whether through voice-over and/or the speech of characters, and the film’s capacity to show the world and its appearances apart from voice-over and character narration.”