New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

108 FILM-NARRATOLOGY
descriptive shots, as analogous to first-person and third-person types of
utterance. Shots that simply render a character’s perception, or the storyworld
itself, are considered examples of first-person or third-person
histoire; shots that bear the inflection or marks of an author are said to be
examples of discours. One of the problems with Nash’s analysis is the
absence of any equivalent to the “second person” in film. As Bordwell
writes, “The second-person pronoun is a necessary component of
Benveniste’s conception of discours: it brings out the presence of the
hearer” (Bordwell 1985:23).
More frequently, critics utilized ENUNCIATION THEORY in a more
metaphoric fashion to highlight the covert presence of discours, the marks
of enunciation, concealed within the overall histoire of the text. One of the
most important critics to accent the discursive marks of a narrator within a
classic cinematic text is Bellour, who, in a series of articles on Hitchcock
(Bellour 1979), finds the marks of “Hitchcock, the enunciator” in certain
camera movements and positions, in certain repetitions of framing and
imagery, in the direct glance by the character into the camera, and in
Hitchcock’s authographical insertion into the fictional space of his films. In
these moments, Bellour argues, Hitchcock marks his presence as creator/
narrator explicitly, revealing these films to be a mode of discours.
Stephen Heath arrived at a similar characterization of the classic film in
an essay called “Narrative Space” (Heath 1981). Here the discussion of
enunciation or mode of address links the categories of cinematic technique,
narratorial discourse and the perceptions of the spectator. These registers
are brought together by way of a structure or metaphor they hold in
common—the notion of “position.” Heath discerns four senses in which
the concept of “position” could be said to structure the fictional experience
in film: the perspective organization of the individual shot, the general
spatial organization of the film—taken as supplying a kind of “ideal view”—
the narrator’s position, attitude or point-of-view, and the “subject
positions” made available to the spectator through the other operations.
His argument is that the eruption of a visible discours, through a violation
of perspective, a break-up of overall spatial organization or a contradictory
narrative point-of-view, will fracture the unified subject position of the
spectator, leading to a fragmentation of identity and self-coherence.
The focus of these critics on narration as a mode of discours standing
out from a general background of histoire is very much a product of the
linguistic models which so influenced film analysis in the 1970s. Although
used here to describe types of narration, the linguistic categories of histoire
and discours should not be confused with the narratological categories of
story and discourse, or fabula and syuzhet. Despite the similiarity of terms,
and despite the fact that Genette uses the term histoire as a synonym for
fabula, it should be remembered that the histoire and discours of
enunciation theory and the story and discourse of narratology have entirely