Enunciation and Narration

Abstract

There are no stories without a storytelling instance. Virtually all narratologists agree on this point. Films differ, however, from novels in that a film can show an action rather than tell it. In that regime of showing (monstration), notably in theatrical staging or in the "documentary" recordings of the LumiGre Brothers, the discursive instance is less apparent than in a written tale. Events seem to tell their own stories. Yet this is misleading, because without any mediation there would have been no recording and we would not have seen the events at all. This perception of events recounting themselves, which some spectators might have (for example in watching a surveillance video) or certain critics might argue for (such as Andre Bazin, when he invokes the "impartiality of the camera" or "the fragment of 'raw reality' in Italian neorealism" [Bazin 1981: 280-l]), does not stand up to analysis.We are confronted with a key question: should narratology start from spectatorial perception, however flawed, or look for a system of narrative instances capable of explaining the textuality of film? This question was posed at a time when the possibility of a film as a narrative was no longer accepted as a postulate and after the decline of the euphoria of those who believed there was a necessary correspondence between messages sent and messages understood in a communication system where every message encoded by a sender was supposed to be received intact, or almost intact, by a receiver.Since then, narratologists have responded diversely to this methodological question. T o simplify what is at stake, consider this image: a ventriloquist and his dummy, for example the impertinent Hugo of Dead o f the Night (Albert0 Cavalcanti, 1945). Here, the dummy has a monologue, confiding his love for this or that well-known singer. If the situation seems comic, that is because the spectator believes (or pretends to believe) that the dummy is responsible for what it "says". But if it turns to the man holding it on his knee to begin a dialogue, the spectator momentarily adheres to the fiction that these two figures are autonomous subjects, sometimes in disagreement with one another. That belief will be strong or weak, depending on whether the viewer is a child or an adult, a "good"

Textual and Visual Correspondence Between the Novel and the Film: The Epistolary Narrative of Love, Simon

“…Love, Simon, adapted from a novel in the epistolary form, successfully demonstrates the journey of the sound between the audience and film, the relationship of the narrator with both the audience and correspondence in the film, creating the "mega narrator" (Gaudreault & Jost, 2004) showing the action, and even telling it. The features that Metz (1974) stated about the movie being a text were also rewarded.…”

Todo lo solido se desvanece en el aire. Sobre atraco perfecto (The killing, Stanley Kubrick, 1956)

“…Según Christian Metz (1972) conviene distinguir la sucesión de los acontecimientos y la secuencia de significantes que el usuario tarda cierto tiempo en recorrer: el tiempo de visión. Tanto Bordwell (1995) como Gaudreault y Jost (1995) abordan esta misma idea, sosteniendo además que desde una perspectiva de construcción sintáctica, estos dos planos pueden articularse en tres niveles (basados en la dialéctica historia-relato) 6 : la relación entre el orden de los acontecimientos que tienen lugar en la historia y el de su aparición en el relato, la relación entre la duración del tiempo del relato y la del tiempo de la historia y la relación entre el número de veces que se evoca un acontecimiento en el relato y el número de veces que tiene lugar en la historia.…”

Varda's Gift of Postcards

“…Certainly, Varda has always had a taste for episodic and interlaced narratives, and here postcards are a convenient means for alternating between her two protagonists and to parallel and contrast their journeys as women and feminists. 12 See also Gaudreault, André and Jost, François. (1999).…”