Narratology and Narration in Film and Transmedia Storytelling

Image from Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)

Narration in the Fiction Film

[David] Bordwell bases his theory of cinematic narration on the work of the Russian Formalists. It is a theory that assumes a distinction between ‘the story that is represented and the actual representation of it’ (1985: 49); a distinction between the narrative as it is constructed by the spectator (the fabula) and the formal systems of representation employed in a film (syuzhet and style). Bordwell describes the spectator’s activity in constructing a narrative in the following terms:

Presented with two narrative events, we look for causal or spatial or temporal links. The imaginary construct we create, progressively and retrospectively, was termed by the Formalists the fabula (sometimes translated as ‘story’). More specifically, the fabula embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and spatial field. … The fabula is thus a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. It is the developing result of picking up narrative cues, applying schema, framing and testing hypotheses. … It would be an error to take the fabula, or story, as the profilmic event. A film’s fabula is never materially present on the screen or soundtrack. … What is given? … The syuzhet (usually translated as ‘plot’) is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film. It is not in the text in toto. It is a more abstract construct, the patterning of a story as a blow-by-blow recounting of the film could render it (Bordwell 1985: 49-50. Original emphasis). [Nick Redfern, 'Film as Text: Radical Constructivism and the Problem of Narrative in Cinema', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 2, Autumn 2005]

Unreliable narration in film and literature

As discussed by Volker Ferenz (Ferenz 2005) in an article on the status of the concept of the unreliable narrator in film studies, the present scope has been wide and highly diverse. Seymour Chatman - one of the few who deals with film and literature equally well - uses it to describe a character who appears to be our source of the shown (i.e. in control of the image) and who turns out to be unreliable (i.e. the picture has not been true), and to describe voice-over narrators whose telling is undermined by the image-track. (Chatman 1978: 235ff, Chatman 1990: 131 ff.) These two uses are pretty much in agreement with what literary studies have been doing. But others, like David Bordwell, George M. Wilson and Gregory Currie, have applied the concept to films with non-personalised narrators where important omissions of information lead the spectator to draw his or her own or false conclusions as the film progresses (Bordwell 1985; Wilson 1986; Currie 1997), and yet others have applied it to films where the normal causal-logic of reality is suspended - either in favour of metafictional manoeuvres, as seen in Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961), or as in ghost stories like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001) or M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999)[2], both partly constructed around the axis of what Tzvetan Torodov labelled the fantastic-marvellous (Todorov 1980). Ferenz shows that Tamar Yacobi's five strategies for the naturalization of textual ambiguities and inconsistencies (Yacobi 1981) is an excellent tool for sorting out some of these (mis)understandings. In Yacobi's taxonomy it is the 'perspectival principle', by which the reader brings discordant elements into a pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker or observer through whom the world is mediated, that are congruent with what literary studies label as an unreliable narrator, and Ferenz shows that many of the films described as unreliably narrated are better understood in accordance with Yacobi's other principles - i.e. as a matter of generic or functional principles. [Per Krogh Hansen, 'Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 5, Autumn 2008-Autumn 2009]

Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular bumper links lists to openly accessible scholarly materials. Today's category of choice is an essential one for our discipline: the study of narratology in film and transmedia storytelling.

As it's such a long list, FSFF will start off proceedings by singling out two particularly useful resources with which those new to this topic might like to begin:

1. Manfred Jahn, 'A Guide to Narratological Film Analysis'. Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary Genres. English Department, University of Cologne, 1.7. August 2, 2003 
2. Dino Felluga, 'General Introduction to Narratology', Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 2003

• Frederick Luis Aldama, 'New Horizons: Cognitive and Narrative Approaches to US Ethnic and Postcolonial Film, Animation, Graphic Novel, and the Arts', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Chiara Armentano, '"The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema', Reconstruction, 8.3 (2008)
• Mieke Bal, 'The GAPS Video Project', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 3, Autumn 2006
• David Bordwell, 'Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures', Philip Rosen (ed). In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia U P, 1986. 17-34
• David Bordwell interviewed by Erlend Lavik, 'The Way Bordwell tells it on classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema', University of Bergen, Norway, June (Year unknown)
• David Bordwell, 'Introduction', The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
• David Bordwell, 'Anatomy of the Action Picture', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2007
• David Bordwell, 'The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2008
• David Bordwell, 'ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the Morphology of Film Narrative', Cinema Journal, 27.3, 1988 
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part I)', Image and Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part II)', Image and Narrative, Issue 9, October 2004
• George Butte, 'I Know That I Know That I Know: Reflections on Paul John Eakin’s “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?”', Narrative, 13.3, 2005
• Chris Cagle, 'More thoughts on Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 14, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 15, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'More on Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Self-Reflexivity in Classical Cinema', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, September 2, 2007
• Celestino Deleyto, 'Focalisation in Film Narrative', Atlantis, Vol. 13, No. 1-2, 1991 
• Kamilla Elliott, 'Introduction', Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003)
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  
• Markku Eskelinen, 'The Gaming Situation', Game Studies, 1.1, 2001
• Dino Felluga, 'General Introduction to Narratology', Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 2003
• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture Journal, Issue 2, Autumn 2008
• Sofie De Grauwe, 'The cognitivist approach to film in the light of systemic-functional theory: a changing of the guards?', Image and Narrative, 1.1, 2000 
• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism-Modernity, Vol. 6.2, 1999
• Per Krogh Hansen, 'Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 5, Autumn 2008-Autumn 2009
• Tim Henderson, 'Classic Film Narrative and Flying with Pigs: What Have we been Missing?', Nausicaa.net, May 2005
• David Herman, 'Narratology as a cognitive science', Image and Narrative, 1.1, 2000
• Curt Hersey, 'Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Volume 1, 2002
• Silke Horstkotte, 'Seeing or Speaking: Visual Narratology and Focalization, Literature to Film', in Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, Edited by Heinen, Sandra, and Sommer, Roy, Berlin, New York (Walter de Gruyter) 2009
• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004
• Kevin Howley, Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope, May 2004
• Manfred Jahn, 'A Guide to Narratological Film Analysis'. Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary Genres. English Department, University of Cologne, 1.7. August 2, 2003 
• Manfred Jahn, 'Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative', English Department, University of Cologne, 2005 (pdf)
• Henry Jenkins, 'Game Design As Narrative Architecture',  in P. Harrington and N. Frup- Waldrop (Eds.), First Person. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and also at CMS / MIT, 2004
• Lilian Joesaar, 'Adapting Prose Narrative into Film Narrative: the Case of The Remains of the Day',  MA Thesis, University of Tartu, 2007
• Jesper Juul, 'Games Telling Stories? - A brief note on games and narratives', Game Studies, 1,1 2001
• Hermann Kappelhoff, 'Narrative Space – Plot Space – Image Space', trans. by Brian Currid, Herman Kappelhof Articles Online, 2005
• Michelle Langford, '[Reflections on and syllabus for the teaching of] The Hollywood System', The Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, July 2007
• Erlend Lavik , "Changing Narratives: Five Essays on Hollywood History", PhD Thesis, University of Bergen, 2007
• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Kia Lindroos, 'Non-Linear Narrative As a Form of Political Action: Viewing Chris Marker’s Film Sans Soleil', ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Mannheim Workshop: 'THE POLITICAL USES OF NARRATIVE' With Maureen Whitebrook and Fabrice Larat (date unknown)
• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010 
• Jason Mittell, Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television", The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006 
• Janet H. Murray, 'The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies', DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, June 17, 2005
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Architectures of Vision: Neo-Baroque Optical Regimes and Contemporary Entertainment Media', MIT Communications Forum, December 19, 1999
• Steve Neale, 'Review of Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique by Kristin Thompson, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999', Scope, November 2000
• Lizzie Nixon, 'I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 40, 2006
• Iva Paneva,“Chapter 1: Monster versus mainstream: classical narrative structure and the representation of women”, A study of female aggression as represented in Patty Jenkins' fiction film Monster, e--PhD Thesis, December 2008 (rest of thesis on Monster HERE)
• James Parsons, 'Genette on Film - Temporal Order and Tense in Non-chronological Cinema', Enquiry, Vol 2, No 1 (2010)
• Ágnes Petho, 'Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies', Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2 (2010) 39–72
• Brock Poulin, 'Dark time (s): non-linear narratives in the postmodern film noir', Masters Thesis, University of British Columbia, April 2005  
• Nick Redfern, 'Film as Text: Radical Constructivism and the Problem of Narrative in Cinema', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 2, Autumn 2005 
• Anelise Reich Corseuil , 'John Huston's Adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead": the Interrelationship between Description and Focalization', Cadernos de Tradução, Vol. 1, No. 7 (2001) 
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Defining Media from the Perspective of Narratology', Århus : Handelshøjskolen i Århus, Institut for Sprog og Erhvervskommunikation, 2005. 14 s. (VÆRK working paper series)
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media', Game Studies, 1.1, July 2001
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'On Defining Narrative Media', Image and Narrative, 3.2, 2003
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Computer Games as Narrative: The Ludology versus Narrativism Controversy', Avatars of Story, at www.dichtung-digital.org/2006
• Tytti Rantanen, 'Gazing me, gazing you: Narrativity, visuality and the questions of power and desire in Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and India Song', Hortus Semioticus, No. 3, 2008
• Vivek Sachdeva, A Study of Narratology in Fiction and Film with Special Reference to The Householder and Heat and Dust, PhD Thesis, Panjab University, Chandigargh, 2007 
• Torben Schmidt, 'Christopher Nolan’s Memento – Analysis of the narrative structure of a noirish revenge film', Seminar: “Decadence and Modernism in Late 20th Century American Cinema, 2003
• Ralf Schneider, Panel on Cognitive Approaches to Character MLA Philadelphia 2006 
• Kevin Schut, 'Technology tells a tale: digital games and narrative', Proceedings of Digra, 2003
• Janet Staiger, 'Self-Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema', Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1991
• Jan Simons, 'Narrative, Games, and Theory', Game Studies, 7.1, 2007
• Eleftheria Thanouli, '"Art Cinema" Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009
• Eleftheria Thanouli, Post-classical narration: a new paradigm in contemporary world cinema, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005 
• Kristin Thompson, 'Classical cinema lives! New evidence for old norms!', Observations on film art and FILM ART, February 12, 2007
• Jan-Noël Thon, 'Computer Games, Fictional Worlds, and Transmedia Storytelling: A Narratological Perspective', The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009
• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004
• David Trotter, 'Virginia Woolf and Cinema', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Andrew Vassiliou, Analysing Film Content: A Text-Based Approach, PhD Thesis, University of Surrey, 2006
• Yigit Yuksel, 'Classical Narration And Art Narration. Or: Hollywood vs Western Europe in 1950s' , The Long Take, September 21, 2008