New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 113
The detective, Paolo, and Guido [in Cronaca] need something extra
to ratify what they have been observing. They need a sanction…a
sort of control coupon as a seal of guarantee; it would legitimize the
presence and performance of the characters…But like the mandate,
the sanction too cannot reach the interested parties unless someone
weighs their actions from the outside…besides a receiver who is
evaluated, a subject who evaluates…
(Casetti 1986: 76)
Casetti’s argument concerning Stage Fright details the process whereby
predication authority is withheld from Jonathon as a character-narrator,
leading to the disauthentication of his version of events—rendered in the
famous “lying flashback” near the beginning of the film. Although the
“lying flashback” appears to be an authentic report of the facts, the
character-narrator or invoking narrator does not possess the authentication
authority that the extradiegetic narrator commands as a matter of course.
In order for Jonathon’s discourse to be taken as true, the enunciator must
confirm the character-narration in some fashion. In Casetti’s model, the
extradiegetic narrator may delegate to a character-narrator certain of the
four narratorial functions, such as performance and competence, and may
allow the mandate to be supplied by another character, such as Eve, who
overtly requests the report from Jonathon, but the crucial ability to be able
to sanction the report of the character-narrator can only reside with an
extradiegetic narrator who alone controls the authentication function.
While everything the extradiegetic narrator fashions yields a fact for the
fictional world, the character-narrator, by contrast, has to “earn his
authentication authority” (Dolezel 1980:18).
A comprehensive and synthetic view of filmic narration is offered by
Tom Gunning in D.W.Griffith and the Origins of the American Narrative
Film (1991). Gunning begins by discussing the apparent difficulty of
perceiving film as a narrative form, given its overtly mimetic character.
How can film be understood to “tell” a story, when it primarily “shows” a
fictional world, in a seemingly neutral way, without narratorial inflection
or com– mentary? His solution is to argue that it is precisely the channeling
and organizing of the mimetic dimension of the film-text that defines the
role of cinematic narration.
The primary task of the filmic narrator must be to overcome the
initial resistance of the photographic material to telling by creating a
hierarchy of narratively important elements within a mass of
contingent details. Through filmic discourse, these images of the
world become addressed to the spectator, moving from natural
phenomena to human products, meanings arranged for a spectator. It