I find the concept of reflexivity extremely interesting in the context of film narration, and I definitely hope we will be exploring this more as the semester progresses. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the various degrees of reflexivity that a certain narrative style can exhibit, and how sometimes the difference in degree lies in subtle elements like performance or framing.

None of the three films we have seen so far is overtly reflexive in regards to its medium (like Woody Allen is, for instance, in Annie Hall) by downright disrupting the filmic illusions in such a direct fashion, but nevertheless they do present subtler signs of narrative reflexivity. Delicatessen seems to me like the most reflexive of the three – that is to say, it does seem to assume the presence of a viewer or spectator for whom the action unfolds. A clear example of this, I think, is the final rooftop scene where the couple is playing music on top of the building: the spatial setup of the scene and the direct gaze of both actors indicate that they somehow acknowledge the spectatorship of an external observer, thus calling attention to the act of “telling” or narration – such examples could be considered diegetic moments in an otherwise predominantly mimetic film. Simple Men presents examples of reflexivity in the actors’ performances and in its “theatrical” quality that we were talking about in class. Since the mise-en-scene and the actors’ performances evoke the medium of theatre perhaps even more than film, the presence of the spectators is, in a way, subtly alluded to, and relies necessarily on the audience’s familiarity with a variety of presentational styles. And finally, perhaps the least reflexive film, in spite of its formal diegetic style, is Stranger than Paradise because, although the editing undoubtedly calls attention to film’s artificiality as a medium of narration, the storyline itself, given its monotony and anti-sensationalism, almost derides the mere idea of an audience – it is almost as if the characters are saying “so what if you’re watching? We’re not going to put on a show for you, we’ll still watch TV in silence and play Solitaire for hours, because that’s what we’d whether you’re watching or not.”