New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 103
such experiments are rare. Unreliable character-narrators are also rare in
film. Breaker Morant, Rashomon and Stage Fright are some of the more
famous examples.
The classic example of unreliable character-narration in film is
Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. Several writers, including Chatman, Kozloff,
Franceso Casetti and Kristin Thompson have proposed various
explanations for the agency behind the “lying flashback” and the method
the viewer uses to sort out the authentic from the authentic version of
events. Thompson, for one, feels that Hitchcock violated one of the tenets
of extradiegetic narration by illustrating and even embellishing Jonathon’s
verbal lie with what are taken to be inherently truthful images, thus
colluding with Jonathon’s deception (1988:148). Kozloff, on the other
hand, recognizes that the ostensible reliability of the image is not intrinsic,
but merely a convention (1988:115). Chatman, for his part, appeals to the
higher narrative authority of the IMPLIED AUTHOR—an agent who
stands between the real author and the narrator as the means by which we
evaluate the truthful and the untruthful versions of the story (1986:141).
The implied author has been defined by Wayne Booth (1983) as the
persona, or implicit image of an author in the text, standing behind the
scenes and responsible for its design, its values and its cultural norms. The
implied author should be distinguished from the real author, and from the
narrator. Unlike the narrator, the implied author does not present or
recount events, but is held to be responsible for the overall choices made in
the text. Unlike the real author, the implied author varies with each text
produced by the real author. In Chatman’s view, the implied author sets
the lying narration of Stage Fright in a context that allows the viewer to
decide the issue.
Casetti provides yet another solution, albeit a very unorthodox one, by
proposing that the “false” images actually correspond to what Eve,
Jonathon’s auditor, imagines as he tells her the lie. Thus the images are
produced by the subjectivity of the character Eve, listening to Jonathon;
Eve could be said to work in tandem with him to create this false
homodiegetic narration: one character supplies the verbal discourse, the
other the images. The extradiegetic narrator is thus relieved of his
culpability of “duplicity” in illustrating the lie (Casetti 1986b).
Despite the apparent difficulty in accounting for this effect, lying
character-narrators in general can be understood simply as invoking
narrators who happen to be duplicitous. The character-narrator is under no
compulsion to “narrate the truth”, either in words or images; in so far as
they merely “report” on the fictional world rather than “create” it, they
can distort the facts of that world without calling the world itself into
question. The fictional world still retains its authenticity, established by the
extradiegetic narrator, despite the inaccuracy of a character-narrator’s
report. Although the images may appear to “overrun” the invoking