New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

94 FILM-NARRATOLOGY
or to the context of the utterance. They are indicators of person or time
that can be identified only by the instance of discourse that contains them;
they have no value except in the instance in which they are produced.
Jakobson calls them SHIFTERS. Pronouns, such as I and you, have no
reference other than to designate the person speaking and the person
spoken to. Aside from pronouns, other shifters can include demonstratives
such as this and that, and indicators of time such as here and now.) Jost
writes:
In order to define the concept of narration, one must establish a
border between telling and seeing. Methodologically speaking, it is
not possible to assimilate, purely and simply, the question of who
sees? to that which is known in literary theory as focalization. In fact,
we have not sufficiently noted that this concept includes two distinct
narrative realities: on the one hand, the knowledge of the narrator
with regard to his characters (does he know more, less or as much as
them?); on the other hand, his position (localization) with respect to
the events that he narrates.
(Jost 1984:195)
Film works in two registers: it can show what a character sees and
say what he thinks. If we don’t want to restrict film analysis to the study of
the image, we must differentiate the narrative “attitude” with respect to the
character/hero in terms of both visual and verbal information.
Jost introduces the concept of OCULARIZATION in contrast or in
addition to that of focalization. Focalization refers to that which a
character knows; ocularization indicates the relation between what the
camera shows and what a character sees. INTERNAL OCULARIZATION
would refer to those shots where the camera appears to take the place of the
character’s eye. EXTERNAL OCULARIZATION (or ZERO
OCULARIZATION) would indicate those shots where the field of vision is
located outside a character’s own.
Ocularization appears to be fundamentally different from focalization as
it occurs in literature: since the latter participates in the verbal
transformation of an event it always belongs to the narrative order, in
other words to that which is related or recounted; ocularization, however,
can leave the domain of narration in order to reproduce visual perception
per se. Because of this direct connection with the seen, ocularization can be
considered on the diegetic side of narrative.
The need to distinguish between the perceptual facet of focalization, or
ocularization, and the psychological facet, or focalization, in Jost’s terms,
has also been addressed by Seymour Chatman. Although Chatman offers
different terminology, the thrust of his argument is that the concept of
focalization has not really remedied the confusion caused by the term