Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large ...

expression is collapsed, and expression cannot be broken down or componentized
without the concomitant breaking down of what is expressed. (Metz 61-64)
A visual spectacle entails a joining of the signifier to the significates, which in
turn renders impossible their disjunction at any given moment and, therefore, the
existence of a second articulation. (Metz 64)
Film is expressive rather than connotative: it does not operate within a dual system of
signification (signifier/signified) but rather in a direct system of expression. Again, this
is not to say that film is without artifice; rather, it is to say that film as a medium makes a
powerful argument for its own reality, for its presence as itself rather than as an
articulation of something else. It makes such an argument through “movement,” through
“corporality,” and, paradoxically enough, through “hermetically isolating fiction from
reality”; that is, by formally and materially sealing itself from intrusion by the reality of
the viewer in a way that, for example, theatre cannot (Metz 11).
Film’s operation on the register of spectacle predates its operation as narrative:
early cinema trafficked in visual shows without novelistic narrative coherence. “The
merging of the cinema and of narrativity was a great fact, which was by no means
predestined – nor was it strictly fortuitous. It was a historical and social fact, a fact of
civilization” (Metz 93). However, narrative has become so popular in cinema that its
presence in the present can easily be misread as fundamental:
In the realm of the cinema, all nonnarrative genres – the documentary, the
technical film, etc. – have become marginal provinces, border regions so to speak,
while the feature-length film of novelistic fiction, which is simply called a
“film”… has traced more and more the king’s highway of filmic expression.
(Metz 94)
However, the incorporation of modes of narrative into film changed film as a genre:
Before becoming the means of expression familiar to us, it was a simple means of
mechanical recording, preserving, and reproducing visual spectacles – whether of
life, of the theater, or even of small mises-en-scene, which were specially
prepared and which, in the final analysis, remained theatrical – in short, a “means
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