Invisible Storytellers

‘The truth is we’re watching each other’: Voiceover narration as ‘split self’ presentation inThe Handmaid’s Tale TV series

“…In such narration, the monologue is grounded in a speaking self who is spatiotemporally removed from the self shown on the screen. In The Handmaid’s Tale , the world viewers see on the screen is experienced with a sense of immediacy (through the physically close camerawork, for example), but while voiceover narration is meant to be a humanising device (Kozloff, 1988), it also creates a sense of artificiality as audiences are also aware that the verbal stream is grounded in a different time and place than the visual text. In this first series, this has the effect of distancing June/Offred from her own tale and makes it seem as though she is a witness to the scene, rather than as someone experiencing it firsthand.…”

“…Observing June/Offred visually while she contemplates other matters verbally creates a clash between the familiar and the impersonal, which is a phenomenon also brought about through the choice of shallow-focus shots alongside voiceover narration. Kozloff (1988) argues that voiceovers are a humanising device (p. 128) (see also Piazza, 2010: 178). At the same time, however, shallow-focus cinematography is associated with unreality, since its use ‘can create a purposefully less realistic image – one that manipulates viewer attention and suggests different planes of action both literally and figuratively’ (Mamer, 2008: 19).…”

When Both Utterances and Appearances are Deceptive: Deception in Multimodal Film Narrative

“…Burgoyne, 1990) that is "external to (not part of) any diegesis" (Prince, 1987: 29) and entirely responsible for the presentation of the diegetic world. This extradiegetic narrator in film narrative has been labelled previously: le grande imagier (Metz, 1974), the camera-narrator (Kozloff, 1988), the intrinsic narrator (Black, 1986), the fundamental narrator (Gaudreault, 1987) or the cinematic narrator (Anderson, 2010;Burgoyne, 1990;Chatman, 1990;Stam et al, 1992). This last term is preferred here, serving as a shorthand metaphor.…”

“…This last term is preferred here, serving as a shorthand metaphor. A view is endorsed here that if there is a narrative, there must be a type of impersonal heterodiegetic narrator involved as a matter of logical necessity (Chatman, 1990;Kozloff, 1988;Ryan, 1981). In addition, the heterogeneous impersonal narrator facilitates establishing the "hierarchy of narrative voices structuring the narrative film" (Burgoyne, 1990: 6).…”

“…Paying little heed to the characteristics of deception in film discourse per se, some philosophical scholarship on deception is illustrated with verbal examples taken from fiction, presented as specimens of scripted but natural discourse (Dynel, 2016(Dynel, , 2018; see also Vincent Marrelli, 2004). Apart from a few mentions and/or very brief discussions of famous deceptive scenes in film studies (Bordwell, 1985;Chatman, 1978Chatman, , 1990Kozloff, 1988), and a range of stylistic content analyses of deceptive characters in fiction, mainly in literature but also in film (e.g. DePaulo, 2010;Ferenz, 2008;Sorlin, 2016), the precious few works in film studies offer more extensive analyses of the phenomenon at hand, albeit variously labelled (e.g.…”