New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

116 FILM-NARRATOLOGY
text: “films, in my view, are always presented—mostly and often
exclusively shown, but sometimes partially told—by a narrator or
narrators” (Chatman 1990:133). In this sense, Chatman’s narrator is very
similar to Rimmon-Kenan’s who, at the very least, “quotes” or
“transcribes” the dialogue or the gestures of the characters.
In the cinema, this narratorial encoding is complex and utilizes both
visual and audio channels: lighting, editing, camera angle and movement,
color, mise-en-scène, can all be attributed to the visual articulations of the
narrator. Music and voice-over or voice-off can be understood as its audio
manifestations. For Chatman, the film-text is narrated in all its details; the
activity of a narrator pervades every aspect of the text.
The stark opposition of Chatman and Gunning’s positions and that of
the non-narrator theorists illustrates the difficulty of specifying the role of
the external narrator in film. Both arguments represent vigorous attempts
to place film in the broad class of narrative forms, describing features of
the film-text that compare to the dominant characteristics of literary
narrative. But these theories seem to ignore the basic differences of the
filmtext from literary narratives, namely the overwhelming importance of
what the literary narratologist Martinez-Bonati calls the MIMETIC
STRATUM—the “real world of the fictional universe,” the “factual
domain” which the viewer imagines he or she perceives directly, rather
than through representation:
the “mimetic stratum” of the work is not experienced as language
but directly as world: the reader does not simply conclude “the
narrator says P” from the narrator’s mimetic statements, he also
derives “P is the case” and regards P as an unmediated fact of the real
world of the fictional universe.
(in Ryan 1984:131)
In film, this would correspond to the distinction between the scenic
presentation and what might be called the discursive aspects of the text, the
distinction between the fictional world itself and the type of expressive
interpolations which might be analogized to Genette’s narrative voice.
Many of the textual elements that Chatman, for example, would
assimilate to the agency of a narrator are perceived by the spectator
directly as elements of the fictional world, rather than as elements of a
narrator’s discourse. Material such as the actor’s appearance, the location
or setting, the mise-en-scène—the entire mimetic stratum which Chatman
ascribes to the presentational activity of a narrator—are perceived
primarily as the fictional world itself, and only secondarily as a narrator’s
discourse. While his argument that the cinematic narrator quotes or
“presents” the entire range of events in the fictional world does serve to
keep the agency of the narrator in the forefront of the model, it creates an