New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

92 FILM-NARRATOLOGY
rather than a sense of individual psychology, this technique emphasizes the
interactions and the general character of an entire social group.
Another type of focalization described by Genette is EXTERNAL
FOCALIZATION. This refers to narratives in which our knowledge of the
characters is restricted simply to their external actions and words, without
the “subjectivity” of the characters, their thoughts and feelings, being
invoked. This is a somewhat questionable category, which has been
criticized from a number of quarters. The most common example given in
literature is the Ernest Hemingway story “Hills Like White Elephants,”
where the characters are rigorously described from an external perspective.
Yet in film, it is difficult to imagine any presentation of characters that
would not include indications about their feelings, thoughts and emotions,
qualities which would necessarily involve internal focalization.
Genette also distinguishes what he calls NON-FOCALIZED or ZERO
FOCALIZATION from external and internal focalization. Zero
focalization concerns narratives in which no character or group of
characters is privileged in terms of emotional, perceptual or cognitive
perspective. Genette compares zero focalization to “classic” narrative style,
or to “omniscient narration.” Here again, this category seems to have very
limted use for film analysis, for with its link to the dramatic arts, film
almost invariably employs characters as channels of narrative information,
and makes especially heavy use of internal focalization as a means of
displacing narrative agency to the characters.
Focalization in film does not comprise the ultimate horizon of its
narrative discourse, despite its wide and powerful role. It should be
remembered that Genette introduced the term to underline the distinction
between narration and focalization, or between the agent who recounts or
presents the fictional world to the spectator and the agent within the diegesis
who serves as a kind of lens or medium through which the events and the
other characters are perceived.
The value of distinguishing focalizaton from narration in film comes to
the forefront when we consider texts that take an ironic stance towards the
focalizing agent, or that manifest a critical attitude toward the focalizer. In
Bertolucci’s The Conformist, the character of Marcello is the subjective
center of the film. He controls not only the optical and acoustic perspective,
but also the memorial perspective, as much of the film is rendered through
his subjective flashbacks. Nevertheless, this CHARACTER-FOCALIZER is
treated both ironically and critically within the discourse of the film, as the
narrator inscribes a level of critical commentary in the visual and acoustic
texture of several sequences. In one scene, for example, Marcello is seen
walking through Rome to the villa of his mother. During this walk, the
camera is canted first to the left, then to the right, while rather comically
bombastic music is heard on the soundtrack. When Marcello arrives at the
villa, which is clearly in decay, he begins closing the gate. Just at this point,