New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 101
Under first-person narrators, Kozloff draws a distinction between
FRAME NARRATORS, character-narrators who begin their narrations
with the first images of a film, but whose actual act of narrating is not
visualized, such as Alex in A Clockwork Orange; and EMBEDDED
NARRATORS, who begin narrating after the story has begun, and who
are visualized in the act of narration, as in Mildred Pierce. Kozloff claims
that frame narrators possess a greater degree of believability, or what
Lubomir Dolezel calls AUTHENTICATION AUTHORITY—the ability to
establish and verify the facts of the fictional world—than do embedded
narrators, who are more likely to be perceived as UNRELIABLE
NARRATORS, and who must “earn” their authentication authority.
Frame narrators in some cases might even appear to “authorize” the
images, as in All About Eve, so that the character’s voice-over seems to
create and control the images, with the image-track responding to cues
from the verbal narration. This device is quite limited, however, and is
never sustained throughout an entire film. Much more common is the
opposite case, where a film or a sequence begins with the limited
perspective of a character-narrator, only to give way to the unlimited
powers of the extradiegetic, “image-maker” narrator, who presents
information and an overall perspective which exceeds the knowledge and
capacity of the character-narrator. Black has compared this operation to
Genette’s PSEUDO-DIEGESIS: “the process of transference of narratorial
status from invoking narrator to intrinsic [extradiegetic or cinematic]
narrator.” He stresses the “dual agency” involved in such films as Double
Indemnity and Rancho Notorious, in which the intrinsic narrator—“that
which narrates the entire film,” the agency that “is congruent with the
discursive activity of the medium itself”—shares narratorial duties with the
character-narrator (Black 1986:22). The limited authority and power of the
character-narrator is underscored by André Gaudreault, who argues that
even in first-person films, it is theoretically necessary to posit what he calls
a fundamental narrator—a narrator who controls the ensemble of
cinematic techniques, including voice-over (Gaudreault 1989).
Kozloff’s treatment of third-person voice-over narrators, which in
Genette’s system would probably be labeled heterodiegetic, deals primarily
with the quality of omniscience conveyed by these voices. As she writes:
“When a narrator is not a character, not a participant in the story he or she
relates, that narrator is not bound by the rules of plausibility that govern
the characters; the narrator is superior to them, the shaper of their
destinies” (Kozloff 1988:97). Such heterodiegetic narrators “mimic” the
authority and power of the extradiegetic cinematic narrator, while being
restricted to the verbal register. The heterodiegetic voice-over narrator is
usually a frame narrator—one whose act of narrating is not visualized, but
is given a kind of free-floating, bodiless status, “a voice from on-high”—