New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 119
can provide the equivalent of a “guided reading.” Indeed, the entire
complex of cinematic representation, including lighting, image texture,
color, sound, music, voice-over—in short, all the codes that Chatman
associates with the narratorial presentation of the fictional world—can also
be employed to convey the cinematic analogue of commentary, evaluation
and emphasis that Gaudreault wishes to reserve only for editing.
An approach which holds promise for resolving these difficulties is the
theory of IMPERSONAL NARRATION. The premises of this theory have
been set out by Ryan in literary narratology, and have been adapted for
film by the present author. The core concept of the theory of impersonal
narration is that impersonal narrative discourse involves two activities: it
both creates or constructs the fictional world while at the same time
referring to it as if it had an autonomous existence, as if it pre-existed the
illocutionary act. By contrast, PERSONAL NARRATION—for example,
the narration of a character-narrator—does not create the fictional world,
but simply reports on it, in the manner of a witness or participant. The
paradoxical situation of impersonal narration—narrative discourse as
world-creating as well as world-reflecting—allows us to conceive the
narrator as both the illocutionary source of the fictional world and as the
agent who comments on, evaluates, qualifies and embellishes the facts of
the fictional world.
In creating the fictional world, the impersonal narrator produces a type
of discourse that is read directly as the facts of the “real world” of the
fictional universe. The impersonal narrator’s lack of human personality
allows the viewer to imagine that he or she is confronting the fictional
universe directly, putting aside any reflection on the form of the narrative
discourse. What Martinez-Bonati calls the mimetic stratum of the work is
not experienced as discourse, but rather directly as world (in Ryan 1984:
131). This is even more apparent in film than in literature where the
narrational discourse, consisting of a range of visual and acoustic signals, is
read primarily as the facts of the fictional world, and only secondarily as a
formal pattern of images and sounds.
The personal character-narrator, on the other hand, does not create a
world, but simply reports on it. Thus he or she can distort the facts of the
fictional world, which still remain intact despite the false report. Contrary
to the opinion of many writers, however, the unreliable characternarrator
can utilize images as well as words, as seen in Stage Fright. Although some
writers, such as Kozloff, argue that it is the convention of realism that
prevents the image-track from distorting the truth (Kozloff 1988:115), and
others, such as Bordwell, that the lying narration in Stage Fright does not
simply report what the liar said but shows it as if it were indeed objectively
true (Bordwell 1985:61), the reliability of the image depends entirely on
whether it is produced by the discourse of a personal narrator or invoking
narrator as opposed to the impersonal narrator. As Ryan says, “everything