New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

102 FILM-NARRATOLOGY
although some films employ an embedded heterodiegetic narrator, such as
Peter Ustinov in Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir.
GENDER IN VOICE-OVER NARRATION
Within the general category of character-narration, there is a tendency to
assign different subtypes on the basis of gender. As Kaja Silverman points
out in “A Voice to Match: The Female Voice in Classical Cinema” (1985),
the disembodied voice-over, or frame narrator, occurs relatively
infrequently in the classical cinema. It seems to be separated from the main
diegesis by an absolute partition, and to invert the usual sound-image
hierarchy: it seems to control the images, and to dictate their order from a
superior position of knowledge. As Pascal Bonitzer (1976:33) suggests, it is
not easily integrated into the rest of the film, for it proclaims its
independence and its superior knowledge too aggressively. If the
disembodied male voice-over is unusual, however, and limited to 1940s
and early 1950s films, the disembodied female voice-over or frame
narrator is all but non-existent. Silverman cites Joseph Mankiewicz’s Letter
to Three Wives as the only example known to her. In sum, it appears that
while female firstperson frame narrators, as in Hanoun’s Une Simple
Histoire, and Holly in Badlands, can be readily found, and female
embedded or invoking narrators, such as Mildred Pierce, may be just as
common as male, the third-person frame narrator seems to have been
assigned strictly to male voices in narrative film up till now.
UNRELIABILITY
One of the features of character-narrators is that they can lie, make
mistakes, or distort the facts of the fictional world. Unlike the extradiegetic,
impersonal narrator, character-narrators do not possess an automatic
authentication authority: what they say must be tested, compared to other
versions of events, and judged according to the general characteristics of
the milieu in which they reside. Their statements do not directly convey the
facts of the NARRATIVE WORLD—defined by the literary narratologist
Dolezel (1980) as the authenticated motifs of the narrative—but rather
convey a version of the facts, which may be subject to the human biases
and limitations of the character-narrator. The character-narrator simply
reports on a world, he does not create or invent that world. The creation of
a fictional world is the sole province of the extradiegetic, impersonal
narrator, a difference in capacity which we will discuss in the next section
of this part.
In film, unreliability is usually associated with an intradiegetic
characternarrator. Although some works like Last Year in Marienbad and
La guerre est finie by Resnais feature an unreliable, extradiegetic narrator,