I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Saturday, the latest Hirschfield offering.  I found it to be quite powerful, but the first 10 minutes or so were absolutely excruciating to watch because the film’s narrative was restricted to the (visual and informational) point-of-view of the main character—a man waking from a stroke-induced coma to find himself entirely paralyzed.  I use the term “point of view” deliberately, because every shot is a POV shot through the eyes of Jean-Dominique, the protagonist.  Through his eyes the audience sees doctors, nurses and therapists move in and out of his field of vision as they explain the condition and the treatment, and we hear his internal monologue, where sarcastic responses add a little bit of humor that helps make the visually disorienting style bearable.  Here, a character seems to be single-handedly narrating the story from within the storyworld.  The focus goes in and out and fades to black and red and shades between as Jean-Do drifts in and out of consciousness, sometimes moving out of the hospital with quick flashes of what we take to be Jean’s memory—still restricted to his visual point-of-view.  It’s tough to watch—literally hard on the eyes in that there is not a comfortable center of attention within the shot that shifts comfortably between shots.  Rather, there’s a constant sense of disorientation.  Around the point that I began thinking I couldn’t take it much longer, the film expanded its narrative point-of-view to a more typically (visually) omniscient one,

Chapman claims that “the logic of narrative prevents him from inhabiting the story world at the moment that he narrates it” (146), but I think this is an effective counterexample.  The problem for my argument is that the film does not persist with its technique of completely confining the narrative to Jean-Do’s perspective.  As the film opens up, this opening sequence becomes just one instance of filtering, what Chapman at one point distinguishes as a “choice made by the implied author about which among the characters imaginable experiences would best enhance the narration” (144, original emphasis).  It is an effective artistic choice, and the horrific disorientation is stylized to emphasize the sense of being trapped—the audience in this confined point-of-view, Jean-Do in his body, which comes with the point of view.  This beginning sequence is therefore very important to establishing an emotional bond between the audience and Jean-Do that heightens the impact of the film as a whole.  Nonetheless, I struggle with the idea that a character can’t be a narrator.  If The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a short film that ended after 10-15 minutes, Jean-Do would be the narrator—is this not enough?  Must it become nothing more than a choice of the implied author in the context of the rest of the film?