Narrative

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Narrative

DEFINING FILM NARRATIVE
TOWARD A HISTORY OF FILM NARRATIVE
CLASSICAL REALISM
NARRATIVE THEORY
CONCLUSIONS
FURTHER READING

Perhaps no term is more central to film history, criticism, and theory than "narrative." Yet narrative is hardly specific to the cinema. Storytelling is a defining trait of human experience and communication. Much of the world's information has always been delivered in story form, whether recounted as personal experience, historical events, imagined fiction, or a mix of all three. Art, entertainment, and instruction have all relied on narrative structures regardless of their form or media, yet the cinema, appearing as it did in the late 1800s, quickly proved itself particularly adept at incorporating and adapting a wide variety of narrative strategies from literature, theater, photography, journalism, and even comic strips. From the beginning, telling stories clearly was a major concern for filmmakers. Almost as quickly, the cinema's ability to present intriguing stories was evaluated by critics and audiences alike. Thus, narrative has always been a key component in how we watch, think about, and write about the cinema, and the history of that narrative theory is a fascinating side of film studies.

DEFINING FILM NARRATIVE

Among the first widely seen motion pictures were the amazing fifty-second films by Louis Lumière (1864–1948) and his camera operators. One of the more famous was the Arrivée d'un train en gare a La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train, 1896), in which the camera records the train pulling into the station, passengers descending and boarding, and bystanders interacting with the travelers. But does a single shot of a train arriving count as a narrative? For most critics, the minimal criteria for determining the presence of narrative include a series of events in some cause–effect order. Causality suggests temporal, spatial, and thematic links as well. Thus these events, "a train arrives, doors open and passengers climb out, a woman runs past holding a small child's hand, a man with a bundle walks after them," provide only the barest markers of narrative. One contemporary newspaper reporter actually embellished his account of the film: "The travelers all look pale, as if they were seasick. We do not recognize characters so much as known types: the petite maid, the butcher boy, and the young man with a humble bundle who has left his village in search of work" (Aubert, p. 225). In recreating the film experience for the readers, the reporter has inserted tiny bits of inferred story material, even generating a feeling of malaise for the arriving passengers and a personal history and goal for the man with the bundle, who now becomes a central character. Thus, critical definitions of film narrative necessarily touch on formal elements of storytelling, but also upon the audience's role in perceiving and comprehending the presented material in those tales.

Narrative is generally accepted as possessing two components: the story presented and the process of its telling, or narration, often referred to as narrative discourse. Story is a series of represented events, characters (or agents for some), and actions out of which the audience constructs a fictional time, place, and cause–effect world, or diegesis. In the Lumière short, the material elements include the arrival of the train, the scurrying of rushed passengers, the gestures of the railway workers, the steam emitted from the engine, even the moving shadows beneath people's feet. Out of these rather minimal visual objects and actions, the viewer generates tiny story events, including any effects that the train has on the people on the platform. The narrative discourse is evident in strategies of presentation, especially the camera position, which offers a view of the action that emphasizes perspective and depth, but also allows the viewers to watch the faces and movements of a number of the people involved. However, Lumière's film offers a very low level of narrative development, in part because of the short length and paucity of story events, but also because of the absence of other narration devices, including plot ordering, mise-en-scène choices, editing, sound effects, intertitles, or camera movement. As films expanded in length and technical options, narrative strategies increased as well. Stories could develop more complex characterization, thematic concerns, and temporal development, along with increasing devices for the narrator to manipulate and present those events.

While many sorts of films employ some storytelling strategies, when we speak of narrative film we are typically referring to fiction films. However, before moving to fiction films completely, we should acknowledge that French film theorist Christian Metz has famously argued that on one level, all films are fiction films. All cinematic experience is based by definition on illusion. Motion pictures are fundamentally still images projected onto a flat screen. Nothing moves and there is no real depth of space, yet we cannot help but "see" movement and spatial cues as the film is projected. The entire process is based on a fiction that what we see is actually present. We know Cary Grant is long dead, we know that we are only seeing his shadowlike image projected on a screen, and yet we see and hear him in an illusory three-dimensional world in which he moves in front of and then behind his desk, right there in front of us. Lumière films, Cary Grant laughing, or a bird chirping in a sex education documentary are all based on an illusion, an absence, that is only possible thanks to the cinematic apparatus and the audience's perception system. From this perspective, the fiction film is a specific type of cinema based on the content of the images and sounds rather than their material traits. The fiction film, the subject of narrative history, theory, and criticism, assumes a spectator who not only sees movement where none really exists, but also constructs characters, time, space, and themes.

Narration is a set of representational, organizational, and discursive cues that deliver the story information to the audience. The fiction film should be thought of as a text, a collection of narrative systems, each of which functions and exists in its own history, with its own stylistic options. For instance, during the 1940s, it became stylistically fashionable for American crime dramas to tell their stories out of order, often with voice-over narrators recounting some past events via flashbacks. Many of those crime dramas were also filmed with increasingly expressionistic sets, lighting, and acting styles. The resulting film noir movies are distinguished by certain shared, generic, story events and discursive strategies alike. Their narrative context was quite different from that of Lumière's train film. Narratives must always be studied in relation to history, including the history of film style, modes of production, and the history of narrative theory itself.

TOWARD A HISTORY OF FILM NARRATIVE

While the cinema was born out of a collection of scientific, industrial, and aesthetic initiatives, its narrative potential quickly came to drive its commercial viability. Alongside "actuality" (actualité) movies, such as most of the Lumières, there quickly grew short chase films and "trick" films, including the many highly influential movies by Georges Méliès (1861–1938). Méliès pioneered an entire subgenre of movies in which camera tricks combine with theatrical settings to allow characters to disappear before our eyes, fly through the air, or even lose their heads. Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon 1902)proved exemplary in presenting a series of scenes, edited end to end, each filled with a combination of painted stage sets equipped with trap doors and fantastic transformations exploiting in-camera editing tricks. He brought the spectacle of magic acts into the cinema, exploiting film's abilities to exceed the limits of real time and space in the theater. Similarly, chase films quickly became a staple of early filmmaking, in part because they too were well suited to a medium with no sound and only fledgling techniques for characterization or plot development.

Chase films followed the logic of comic strips, with a simple initial situation that leads through a series of accumulating visual gags. A typical scenario might include a dog stealing a string of sausages from a butcher, who gives chase, knocking over pedestrians as he goes, who then pursue him as he pursues the dog, with the number and variety of collisions and participants increasing steadily. One version is Pathé Studios' La Course des sergents de ville (The Policemen's Little Run, 1907). These films, like more melodramatic variations, such as Rescued by Rover (1905), take full advantage of early cinema's strengths, including its ability to show rapid movement and edit together a string of chronological events. These films were structured much like live-action comic strips, with individual shot sequences replacing the static comic frames. Many early narratives retold formulaic tales or condensed stories that were already well-known to the audience, so that there would be no need to explain character relations or motivations. Simplified reenactments of the crowning of a monarch, scenes from famous plays (Hamlet, for example) or novels (such as Uncle Tom's Cabin), or even Bible stories could be just as comprehensible as chase films full of visual gags.

The film historian Tom Gunning has found early cinema's tendency toward spectacle and illusion as evidence that it is more a "cinema of attractions" than a cinema straining to tell stories. Many cinema pioneers shared the same impulse as that of carnival or vaudeville acts. Their task was to present highly exhibitionistic entertainment shows that would grab and hold the spectator's attention. Films would be organized as a series of displays, occasionally linked by some story line that allowed for a logic of scene-to-scene ordering. Characterization, however, was often kept to a minimum, and the films' success was measured more by their effects than their stories or themes. Previously, some film histories had simplistically reduced much of early cinema to a series of baby steps toward an arsenal of effective fictional devices. More recently, however, historians of early cinema have labored productively to clarify the differences between film practice before 1910 and the subsequent, more narratively constructed, and voyeuristic silent cinema. Nöel Burch has labeled the early tendencies toward a unique film practice as a Primitive Mode of Representation, a mode that repeatedly defies and frustrates narrativity.

From the beginning, cinema was exploited for its ability to display processes in real time, which privileged documentation and instructional filmmaking, but most exploration of the medium, including avant-garde investigations of film's more abstract or formal potential, has historically been reworked and adapted for narrative purposes. The 1910s was a transitional decade for motion pictures throughout the world. The exhibition of films became more standardized into programs, typically featuring narratives to anchor the screening, though the bill also included documentaries and eventually animated cartoons. By the middle and late 1910s, it was the feature narrative presentation that lured audiences to the movies, thanks in large part to new theaters, stars, and the establishment of new genres that all attracted more middle-class spectators. With the increased length of films and the rise of specialized motion picture studios, American cinema, in particular, came to be built on corporate models, with division of labor, boards of directors, and prescribed slates of annual production quotas. Along with that, it began to concentrate on predictable, efficient stories and styles. Internationally, specialized film studios were being built that allowed more evocative lighting designs and facilitated increasingly intricate camera movements and set construction. A more conventional, commercial narrative cinema was in place by 1920 that was easily distinguishable on every level from the shorter, now somewhat radically diverse films of 1910. This new norm for narrative filmmaking became known as the classical realist cinema, and its dominant American form was the Classical Hollywood Cinema.

CLASSICAL REALISM

The rise of this more realist cinema owes to a great many factors and influences, but it is clearly tied to the increasingly industrial base of the cinema that built upon narrative traits from the nineteenth-century novel and the well-made theatrical play. Narrative unity was built around character psychology within a rational world where events were relatively plausible, even in genres such as the adventure film. The "realism" of classical realist cinema was a product of numerous cultural and now cinematic codes and conventions. Further, the specific ability of the cinema to record and edit representational images lent great power to the credible presence of the characters and their fictional actions and worlds. The steady development toward an increasingly narrative cinema brought some more conservative forces to bear on film practice, especially with the more industrial, studio production norms. Burch and others label this an Institutional Mode of Production because of its privileging of consistent thematic, spatial, and temporal parameters. Clearly, the most successful model for this international classical realist cinema was the Classical Hollywood Cinema.

The formation of classical Hollywood narrative has been explained by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, who argue that classical story construction went hand in hand with developments in the mode of production and new conventions in film style. The classical narrative is organized around a goal-driven protagonist whose desires determine the cause–effect ordering of the plot, which often comes to include a second, embedded plot line. Saving the western town from the outlaws may also involve helping out and finally falling in love with the school marm, for instance. Minor characters typically help or hinder the protagonist's progress. Moreover, the time and space serve the story, which is often generic or formulaic, and there is clear closure with the protagonists achieving or failing to achieve their goals. During the 1910s in particular, Thompson points out that the move to feature-length films forced filmmakers to look to short stories and novels more and more for guidance in character and plot developments. Simultaneously, film techniques had to adapt to the challenges posed by longer narratives. Editing and camera techniques, along with lighting, acting gesture, and even set construction, worked toward clear methods of delivering story information.

With the rise of studio productions and more standardized storytelling, writers and directors functioned increasingly as narrators, guiding the audience's attention with film language as well as written inter-titles. More and more, unity of purpose and even redundancy were built into the presentation of fictional worlds, moving storytelling away from the series of tableau shot sequences and lack of closure that characterized much of the primitive film aesthetic. Increasingly, time and space were constructed around characterization, themes, and plausible plot ordering, with eyeline matches or dissolves clearly delineating the protagonist's perceptual attention or thoughts. Analytical editing, and especially shot-reverse shots, concentrated the audience's attention upon the interplay between actors while systematically unifying a functional diegetic time and space, or the world of the fictional character. After the established dominance of the classical cinema, first in the United States and then internationally, the free play of tableau space and other key components of the primitive aesthetic only resurfaced in consistent form in various avant-garde movements. Classical realist cinema, building as it did upon representational codes for verisimilitude and stories that stressed plausibly motivated human agents, became the foundation for commercial narrative cinema worldwide.

The arrival of sound added greatly to narrative cinema's arsenal. Recording natural sound, which later became known as direct sound, provided "real" documentary-quality sound. However, sync-sound recording was quickly found to require some manipulation to appear natural and at the same time serve the story. Sound design was tested for ways it could reinforce the narrative, delivering essential information such as dialogue and key sound effects and music, while repressing potential distractions. Sounds were carefully selected to guide the spectator's attention to specific characters or events and to fit the diegetic space. Even interior scenes began to have distinctive mixes, so that a conversation inside an office building in one scene should have a

D. W. GRIFFITH
b. David Wark Griffith, La Grange, Kentucky, 22 January 1875, d. 21 July 1948

D. W. Griffith's status in the history of the cinema is unique. Griffith grew up in a family that romanticized the mythic Old South and its values—his father was a Confederate Civil War hero—and he also prized Victorian literature and melodrama. Initially an actor, Griffith pursued playwriting, then shifted into writing for motion pictures, quickly earning a job as director at Biograph in 1908. No other director's career has gone through such extreme shifts in critical reception. For most of the twentieth century, Griffith was heralded as the founder of American cinema's narrative traditions, thanks primarily to his steady stream of over four hundred innovative short films and then The Birth of a Nation (1915). Subsequent features, especially Intolerance (1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919), were also praised for their story construction and technical sophistication. He was credited with adapting nineteenth-century narrative devices for the cinema and bringing genre, character development, and continuity editing into Hollywood movies. Publicity surrounding Griffith helped forge the mythical image of the motion picture director as creative genius.

Griffith's career parallels the growth of narrative cinema. He was there every step of the way as movies shifted from shorts to spectacular features, from a cottage industry to the classical studio system. Starting in 1908, Griffith brought together an efficient production team. Their films, including The Lonely Villa (1909), The Lonedale Operator (1911), and The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), reveal a constant updating of techniques for delivering story information clearly and emotionally. Griffith refined staging, shot composition, scene-to-scene organization, and editing rhythm to build character, suspense, and logical time–space relations. The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Broken Blossoms exploited early cinema's full arsenal of storytelling techniques, including cross-cutting, rhythmic editing, and manipulative mise-en-scène. The controversies surrounding The Birth of a Nation also proved the cultural power of cinema. However, by the 1920s, Griffith's career was uneven at best. His two early sound films were failures, and after The Struggle (1931), he never directed again.

Since the 1980s, Griffith's status has been in nearly steady decline, or at least dramatic reassessment. An important renaissance of early film history has systematically rediscovered and reinserted other individuals, films, and social forces as crucial formative influences on the development of American and world cinema. Moreover, the insights of cultural studies made it impossible to continue forgiving the sexism and vicious racism at the core of his work while at the same time praising his craft and romanticizing his life. For many today, Griffith represents much that was wrong with Hollywood, American ideology, and even dominant film histories of the past. Nonetheless, Griffith's films remain key texts for understanding the development of narration in cinema. Theorists interested in film language point to their shot scale and editing patterns as important markers of a developing cinematic code system, while others look to Griffith as a canonical source of gender and genre construction in cinema.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Lonely Villa (1909), A Corner in Wheat (1909), Enoch Arden (1911), The Lonedale Operator (1911), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), Judith of Bethulia (1913), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), America (1924)

NARRATIVE THEORY

Under the influence of more modernist film practice, as well as political and culturally inspired theory of the 1960s and 1970s, film criticism began to question systematically the cinema's ideological functions. Classical realism was one of the first sites to be investigated. In the pages of the British journal Screen, Colin MacCabe was representative of the growing resistance toward notions of classic realism, a resistance motivated by French Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, especially the work of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. MacCabe and others argued that cinema cannot reveal the real as if it were some transparent window onto the world. Rather, film must be analyzed as a set of generally contradictory discourses. Theorists pushed for analyzing the wide range of discursive markers in realist films, which had become the dominant aesthetic of narrative cinema, but they also renewed attention to films that violated the classic realist norms and thus worked against easily consumed notions of the real.

The French journal Cahiers du cinéma had already turned much of its attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s away from conventional narrative cinema and toward the more marginalized forms of cinema verité, Third World political cinema, and especially the narrative experimentation by Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933), Danièle Huillet (b. 1936), and Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930). For Cahiers, film practice was only valuable if it undercut the illusionism of classic realism and fore-grounded the labor of production. Tout va bien (All's Well, 1972), which opens with a scene in which Godard writes checks to cover the necessary expenses of film production, became an exemplary film for critics attacking classic realist narratives. It constantly acknowledged its constructed nature, it overtly concerned itself with the politics and economics of everyday decisions, was made by a collective (the Dziga Vertov Group), and defied representational norms of both documentary and fiction filmmaking. By this point, Cahiers du cinéma was so actively opposed to conventional narrative norms that it had stopped reviewing any commercially released movies. Much of this highly politicized narrative theory prided itself on its strict Marxist foundations, but others, including the director François Truffaut (1932–1984), argued it had become so elitist that the articles were impenetrable for anyone lacking a Ph.D. in political science. The discourse of film theory and criticism had entered a new, more academic phase that drew from the demanding changes in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

One of the most significant shifts in narrative analysis began in the 1960s with the French theorist Christian Metz, who built upon linguistic theory, including that of Ferdinand de Saussure, to bring structural analysis into film scholarship. Metz, along with Roland Barthes, set the groundwork for much of subsequent work on narrative, including the shift toward discourse analysis. Adopting methodology from the field of semiotics, Metz began looking for how the cinema could be said to signify, or generate, meaning. Signification is a dynamic process that depends upon material signifiers, which for cinema include representational images, titles, spoken language, dissolves, and music and their range of signifieds, or denotative and connotative meanings. Signifying practice became the term for how movies told stories. Metz started by evaluating cinematic equivalents to language and systematically defined codes at work in cinema, much as Roland Barthes defined codes in literature. With S/Z (1970) in particular, Barthes pointed out that realism depended upon a system of textual, intertextual, and extratextual codes. Narrative analysis must include breaking down a text's codes of signification, but it also involves looking at cultural contexts and restrictions.

The assumption is that language is a social force struggling to shape how we think and act. Realism was a suspect mode of culturally determined, ideological discourse, and the reader or spectator must struggle to decode the text's systems or risk blindly submitting to its logic. If realist novels offered an illusory, coherent bourgeois worldview to naturalize culture's status quo, classical cinema, with its visual and audio power to "represent accurately," would have even more cultural power. Thus, realist cinema had to be attacked for its strategies of masquerading the fictional as natural. Metz and many others began to analyze the convincing "impression of reality" generated by strong cinematic cues, and a second stage of structuralism, more interested in intertextual and extratextual codes of spectatorship and ideology, became a central component of narrative theory.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many narrative theorists increasingly shifted from defining the narrative instance to explaining the process known as enunciation. One influential linguist was Émile Benveniste. For Benveniste, story (histoire) tries to hide its marks of communication, presenting itself in an impersonal, objective manner. By contrast, discourse includes markers of narration. In literature, the difference could be simplified down to whether the narration presents its information as given facts or includes references to a narrator, as in "I-you." The process of address, enunciation, structures the spectator's relation with the text. The enounced is always a product of enunciation, which, like language, is a social process. The analyst uncovers these marks of communication, which many classic realist films try to disguise and cover over. Thus, enunciation theory concentrates on syntax and cinematic modes of address that might be equivalent to those in verbal communication and calls for unmasking texts that pretend to tell their stories naturally. From this perspective, classic realist texts deceitfully pretend to be objective when they are actually complex, culturally determined discourses.

Renewed debate surrounding the specificity of cinema merged with interest in linguistics, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies and localized attention onto the cinematic apparatus and the spectator, or film subject. French and British theorists as varied as Jean-Louis Baudry, Colin MacCabe, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Stephen Heath became increasingly concerned with the cinema's ability to "position the subject." Lacanian notions of subjectivity, based in part on the developmental move from imaginary to symbolic stages, privileged interest in point of view structures in the cinema. One assumption was that just as the young human subject was positioned by cultural structures, the film subject was determined by cinema's forms and modes of address. Baudry and others questioned the camera lens as a tool of ideology, built as it was to replicate monocular perspective and transform the social individual into a spectatorial subject. Now, Lumière's film of a train pulling into the station could be seen as a means for organizing and perhaps taming the social spectator. Further, Bellour explored how character desire and its submission to the "law" in classical cinema, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock in particular, structure narrative films as Oedipal journeys, replaying our inherent struggles for subjectivity. Metz too investigated the cinema as an "imaginary signifier" that satisfied, repeatedly, the spectator's regressive, voyeuristic drives.

The cinematic spectator was not only defined by the visual structures of the cinema, but narratives became evaluated for how they reinforced or challenged dominant cultural issues. If spectators were positioned visually, they were also positioned culturally within the mythic or symbolic structures of dominant ideology. Narratives, and commercial classical narratives in particular, became suspect for reinforcing bourgeois, typically patriarchal perspectives. The spectator could thus be doubly positioned, once by the apparatus, a second time by socially determined, and determining, narrative structures. Narrative and spectatorship thus became key concerns for feminist theorists. Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Annette Kuhn in particular directed feminist attention beyond the narrative surface of patriarchal main-stream cinema. Issues of race, class, and gender went beyond cataloging types of representations and were analyzed throughout the cinema's camerawork, editing, soundtrack, and plot structures.

While much of the theoretical legacy of enunciation theories of narrative, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies continues to thrive and inform film studies, it often reduces narrative analysis to serving as symptoms for larger social issues. Some narrative theorists, including Seymour Chatman, remained focused on the processes specific to cinematic narration. Work on intertextuality and narrative, much of it inspired by the literary theorist Gérard Genette, proved particularly pertinent to film studies. Moreover, the theorist and historian David Bordwell argued that enunciation theory remains too deeply indebted to verbal communication to be fully applicable to the cinematic experience. These new perspectives have led to rigorous investigation into motion picture narratives and challenges to recent theories of spectatorship. Many narrative theorists refused to reduce spectators to passive, predetermined subjects, but rather posited active participants in the production of meaning. Bordwell argued for a cognitive-based investigation of film practice and found that Russian Formalism, with its precise attention to story, plotting, and style, provided a methodology that functions well with cognitive vocabulary to reveal how spectators perceive and process cinematic images and sounds to comprehend narrative. Films deliver motivated cues and spectators apply an array of cognitive schemata to construct and understand fictional film worlds. Murray Smith enlivened the area of spectator identification, offering a highly functional grid to understand how films cue audiences to sympathize and identify with fictional characters. Cognitivism has contributed strongly to the rethinking of narrative films in relation to concrete models of human perception and comprehension.

CONCLUSIONS

There are many ways to think historically about narrative cinema. There is the history of storytelling itself, from presenting a train pulling into a station to the rise of the classical realist film, the modern art cinema, and the thousands of alternative individual filmmakers working to challenge the limits of mainstream narrative. But there is also the intricate history of how film criticism and theory have addressed the cinema. Strangely, within the debates over realism, artifice, personal expression, and cultural determinations, certain directors return over and over as examples. Two of the most important filmmakers, for a wide range of narrative critics, have been Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard. No other directors figure so prominently in narrative theory of the past fifty years. Hitchcock's masterful narration provides many of the most canonical scenes for analysis from any perspective, and Godard's work has systematically challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary. The heart of narrative film is still the cinematic practice that makes defining story, narration, and the role of the spectator so fascinating. The history of narrative film remains forever inter-twined with the history of film production, film criticism, and the theorizing of the spectator, whose glorious task remains to perceive, decipher, and finally comprehend the stories generated by those still, two-dimensional images flashing upon the movie screen.