of ideologically suspicious strategies of subject positioning much 1970s film theory had – in a crude summary – consigned them to (see Bordwell 1996: 6–18). But it only activates the audience up to a point. For Bordwell, narration is ‘the organization of a set of cues for the construction of a story’ (Bordwell 1985: 62). The aim is the (re)construction of the story, which produces the enjoyment that makes the exercise worthwhile. Narrative strategies do not enter into the enjoyment equation:
For the viewer, constructing the story takes precedence; the effects of the text are registered, but its causes go unremarked. […] The spectator simply has no concepts or
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terms for the textual elements and systems that shape responses. It is the job of theory to construct them, the job of analysis to show them at work. (Bordwell 1985: 48)
Out of the frying pan and into the fire of another round of academic self-empowerment.
But its applicability is limited. It is obvious that Bordwell’s stance does not work for what he calls ‘art-cinema’, ‘historical-materialist’ and ‘parametric’ narration (Bordwell 1985:
205–310), and even for classical Hollywood narration it may only go so far. To focus on a subservient element of film such as music may help to see the limitation of Bordwell’s view.
The playfulness so many films show in their use of music makes one suspect that the fun in audio-viewing films lies not just in story (re)construction, aided and abetted by narrative techniques, but at least partly in the to and fro of attention between story and narration, between what is shown and told and how it is shown and told. Otherwise, too much of the artifice of film narration would seem gratuitous.
Looking at the way we look at art, Roger Scruton points out the ‘double intentionality’
of our perception of it. When we see a face in a portrait, we are ‘presented with two simultaneous objects of perception: the real picture, and the imaginary face’ (Scruton 1997: 87; discussed in Biancorosso 2001: § 15–23). Scruton uses the term in the context of his aesthetics of music. Music, too, we can understand as physical sound, but also as a way of making patterns and sense (see Scruton 1997: 96). We can add a further differentiation.
The ‘real picture’ itself can be understood on two levels: as a physical object of wood and canvas and paint, and as a piece of artistry that uses colour, brushstrokes, etc., to create what in some respects resembles a human face. Strictly speaking, we see three things at once: a physical object; a painting imitating aspects of a human face; and the person that painting is meant to represent (or invent). With regard to film, these three levels would be the projection of patterns of light on a screen and sound in space; the film as a set of narrative cues; and the story we (re)construct on their basis.6 The first level is narratologically not very interesting, but the other two are. When we watch a narrative film, what we experience (or, rather, construct) is a story presented to us through the artifice of cinematic storytelling. But we also see a piece of filmic artifice that takes a story as it subject, and the ‘work’ we must expend to construct the story out of what the film offers us may not just be a condition for our getting the story, but part of the fun – the journey is the reward.
Much used to be made in film scholarship of the idea that classic Hollywood storytelling was (or is) geared towards foregrounding the story and keeping the artifice of its telling in the background. But to look at the often highly self-conscious way music is used in many classic Hollywood films makes one wonder if this does not deserve to be taken with a pinch of salt. Cognitivist narratology ought to be able to entertain a broader view of audience activity, since it is concerned with understanding how the ‘elements and systems that shape 6 Non-representative art has only two levels: a Mondrian grid painting is both a physical object of wood,
canvas and paint, and a graphic pattern (though it may trigger associations of other objects).
responses’ work. That should allow for the possibility that spectators understand them intuitively, even if they may not be able to put them into words.
A second lesson to be learned from a subservient element such as music is that there may be – as Kristin Thompson warned in her analysis of Ivan the Terrible/Ivan Grozny (1944) –
‘significant structures in the work that do not contribute to the narrative’, which is ‘not always the most important structure in a given film, scene or segment’ (Thompson 1981: 267; see also Yacavone 2012). For Ivan the Terrible, she describes two such non-narrative aspects:
(1) its ‘disjunctions and discontinuities’ (Thompson 1981: 261–86), especially in comparison to contemporary Hollywood practices – disjunctions that form a coherent stylistic layer of their own and in that way dialectically contribute to the unity of the film; and (2) what she calls ‘excess’ (Thompson 1981: 287–303) – individual elements of a film that are enjoyable not as contribution to narrative structure or a stylistic system, but for their own sake.
Bordwell is sceptical: ‘The trouvailles will never add up’ (Bordwell 1985: 53). But they do not have to add up, do not have to offer an alternative to the story-constructing audience activity he is interested in; they only have to add allure. Here, a musically integrated soundtrack (see point 4 above) might come into its own, even if musical integration adds not much to story understanding. The composite art of film usually relies on the smooth cooperation of its elements, but also on the attractiveness of each element, sometimes even at the expense of the whole.7
6. Narratology is methodologically precarious. Its name proclaims that it is concerned with storytelling per se, in whatever medium it may happen. But most of its concepts were developed for the analysis of literary texts, novels in particular. Comparisons with literature can be enlightening for the understanding of narrative in film, and I have used them where they seemed helpful. But one must not overlook what is specific to film, and interrogate the usefulness of concepts for the medium.
A major difference is that most literary narratives (novels, short stories, narrative poems) most of the time consist of a single stream of data, while film has multiple channels, visual and auditory, each of which can simultaneously present different strands of data (through split screens or layered images or sounds), strands we may assign to different narrating agencies, levels of narration or focalizations. While it would be pointless to argue which medium allows the more complex narrative structures, it is important to recognize that they allow different kinds of complexity.
A more minor difference concerns access to information. While the idea that film is an inherently ‘realist’ medium has produced a lot of problematic discussion and aesthetics, and while one must not downplay the artifice of film, one should not overlook the fact that literature finds it easier to peer into characters’ minds than film, which tends to be better with the outside of things. That has consequences for the representation of subjectivity in different media (discussed in ch. II.v with regard to focalization).
7 Peter Verstraten has argued, however, that in some cases, elements of stylistic excess are meta-functional as ‘built-in guides for “reading” or watching’ (Verstraten 2009: 190).
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7. Narratology is methodologically precarious in yet another sense. Its objects are texts, but they make sense only in a complex configuration. If we return to the narrative ur-situation of a friend telling us over a pint in the pub what happened to her that day (see p. 5), the techniques she employs in her ‘text’ – her tale – are shaped by her narrational intentions, which in turn are informed by her assumptions concerning our reaction to those techniques. But narratology normally only has access to the text, not to intentions or reactions, which have to be extrapolated from the text. We can, of course, try to find out about the intentions of authors and film-makers, and can try to establish how readers and viewers actually understand narratives (discussed e.g. in Wuss 1999; Bortolussi and Dixon 2002; for the perception of music in film, see Bullerjahn 2007). But in the collaborative art of film, authorial intentions may be even more elusive than in other arts, and artists are often less than forthcoming with reliable information about their intentions.
On the other side, methodologically sound empirical psychology tends to operate with too wide a mesh to capture finer theoretical distinctions, and especially with regard to the time-bound art of film there is not much hope that psychonarratology will anytime soon catch up with theory.
But even if we could find out more, historical authorship and reception are not the same as the analysis of what texts show us of intentions and the perceiver reactions they presuppose.
The concepts of the ‘implied author’ (see ch. II.iv.d) and ‘implied reader’ capture the fact that narrative texts embody intentions and assumed reactions and can be analyzed independently of actual intentions, expectations and reactions.
And yet, empirical reality is difficult to cancel out, particularly on the reception side. The narratologist is, after all, just another audience member, and his understanding inevitably shapes the analysis of textual features that betray the narrative game of (re)presentation, implication and interpretation. For David Bordwell, (cognitive) audience activity is the core of film narratology. But he does not distinguish strictly between an ‘implied viewer’ as a placeholder for features of films that assume mental audience activities on the one hand, and historical audiences and their contingent understanding of films on the other. That has been criticized (e.g. by Markus Kuhn), especially with regard to Bordwell’s concepts of a
‘classical style’ of Hollywood narration and a ‘classical spectator’ (Bordwell 1985: 156–204), which inform each other:
Because Bordwell draws on a range of historical norms and rules of production for his description of the ‘classical narration’ that moulds the ‘classical spectator’, he mixes processes of reception and production and thereby creates a methodological feedback loop […] a tautological circular argument that does not leave much space for the analysis of an individual film. (Kuhn 2011: 34–35)
But a methodological feedback loop makes sense if it describes a historical feedback loop (the ‘hermeneutic circle’ is a variant of this idea). It would not make much sense to claim that assumptions about audience reactions do not influence the way films are made, and that in
turn films do not condition audiences to approach them with certain expectations. Textual traces of intentions, expectations and reactions are the sediment of historical processes of production and reception. Even text-immanent approaches to narrative (as advocated by Kuhn) tend to rely on (often unacknowledged) assumptions about audience perspectives;
the borderline between implied and real recipients can be thin. Methodological purity becomes problematic if it fails to sufficiently capture reality.
It may make more sense – and may be unavoidable anyway – to bring that into the open:
to use my own understanding of, and reactions to, films and their music to analyze textual strategies, analyses which in turn inform my understanding. I can only hope that that understanding is sufficiently representative to make sense to others; if the book says ‘we’, it does so in this hope. If a particular technique or example can be understood in different ways, I have tried to spell those out, but it is also unavoidable that this is not exhaustive – alternative takes are welcome.