Category Archives: Bordwell

The Narrational Modes of Annie Hall

In class today, we discussed Annie Hall in relation to the modes of art cinema, classical Hollywood and a touch of parametric narration. At the time I had a half-baked sort of though about historical-materialism, but couldn’t formulate it enough to possibly warrant mentioning it in class. But now that I’ve had a chance to marinate, here it is for your consideration:

Annie Hall can be considered with respect to the historical materialist mode. Not in terms of editing, obviously. In fact, not in terms of most of the salient features of historical materialism, but stick with me for a minute here. 

A few features of historical materialism, as laid out by Bordwell:

1. The syuzhet is both a narrative, and an argument.

Alvy is clearly presenting an argument about his actions over the course of the film. 

2. Typage defines characters as belonging/representing a prototype of an entire social group. 

Could Alvy Singer be more of a prototypical neurotic jew? His very appearance and physical mannerisms define him as such.

3. The end of the film is pre-determined, so the film is interested in how history unfolds.

From the get-go, we know that Alvy and Annie will break up. The film is interested in meditating on how this occurred. 

4. Overt-narration is used to identify the filmmaker, including defamiliarizing classical notions of time and space, self-conscious use of formal elements, and frontal staging of action, where characters directly address the camera.

I’m sure none of us would argue that Woody Allen, the filmmaker and authorial presence, has no bearing on Annie Hall. But more than that, the film does do it’s best to disrupt classical norms of “film reality.” Alvy will interrupt a scene to directly address the camera. Time and space are fluid concepts. Woody Allen self-consciously uses film form, including animation and subtitles, to further confuse classical notions of narrative. 

I’m not arguing that Annie Hall and October are genetically related. Annie Hall follows some of the generalized conventions of historical-materialism, but certainly not in the way the Soviet’s intended. I guess my point is, it is easy to write off the historical-materialist tradition as a discrete, and specifically historical (as in “in the past”) film movement localized to the Soviet Movement and solely concerned with films about the success of the socialist revolution. But looking at the movement as a mode, and as one including, but not limited to, Soviet notions of montage, opens the historical-materialist tradition and allows it to apply to such Hollywood creations as Annie Hall. 

Classical Hollywood versus Art Cinema Modes

A la the closing comment of Professor Mittell yesterday, I left class thinking about the distinction between Hollywood and Art Cinema as modes of narration, and how they applied to our screenings thus far. Reflecting on the year to date in light of these distinctions, I find our first screenings to be the most interesting blend of Classical and Art modes. Stranger than Paradise and Delicatessen both blend elements of these modes without fully subscribing to either one.

At first glance, Stranger than Paradise seems to be the epitome of the art mode. The style is self conscious: long takes separated by black of varying lengths throughout the film. There is almost no “plot” as the Hollywood mode would conceive of it, and what little there is, is explicitly interested in the character’s psychology. The film is author-driven, especially once you discover the way it was funded and filmed. However, there is really no blurring of objectivity and subjectivity, which is part of the Classical Hollywood mode. Additionally, the film is temporally linear, the narration is omniscient, there is a tenuous thread of causality tying the plot together, and the film is fairly redundant. But what causes me the most problems when trying to categorize Stranger than Paradise is the character psychology that would seem to place it in the art cinema mode. Yes, the film is interested in the murkiness of Eddie’s mentality. But we are never really let inside his mind. In La Jettee (which we described as an unabashed art film) we know what the protagonist is thinking. We follow his logic through the voice over. In Stranger than Paradise we are never really sure why Eddie does what he does, or even if he goes through a psychological arc. Is it necessary to experience the character’s psychology in the art mode? Or just to understand that it is operating below the surface?

The case of Delicatessen is the reverse. The story circles around a goal driven protagonist and an antagonist. Questions in the plot are quickly answered and the story moves forward efficiently and in a linear manner. But the style is not completely in service of the narrative. Yes, the color scheme serves to identify the world as apart from ours. But the rhythmic editing does little for the story, and, in fact, distracts the viewer in its purely formal aspects. Once again, a film doesn’t fit into either mode completely. Which begs the question, does any film completely subscribe to a single mode as described by Bordwell?

Wherefore Art Thou, oh Narrator?

Chatman argues persuasively (at least, once it got translated into human-speak in class–hats off to Professor Mittell for that one) that the viewer constructs a cinematic narrator and implied author while watching a film text. At the time, it made sense. Anyone “reading” a film will create a prime mover behind every choice in the text and infer their thematic/ideological message based upon the sum of those choices, when in real life, a cadre of professionals and artisans with innumerable outlooks contribute to the narrative processes of the film. During our blargument, Aaron wrote that he looked to his construct of the Coen brothers for answers to the perplexing subjectivity of Barton Fink. Clearly, here is concrete evidence for Chatman’s argument. 

But Bordwell is not satisfied. I can’t tell if Chatman and Bordwell are locked in mortal combat for all eternity (a text is forever after all) just so they each have an excuse to keep publishing the same theories over and over, or if they really do feel this strongly about a narrator. Seems like a silly fuss over the signification of eight letters, but that’s just me. Anyway, Bordwell counters,

A filmmaker or group of filmmakers created the system of cues we are to follow, and as real agents ourselves we engage with those cues. End of story. 

It seems to me that Bordwell’s primary argument against Chatman’s concepts of the cinematic narrator and implied author is Occam’s Razor. If we don’t need Chatman’s concepts to bundle Bordwell’s stand-alone concepts, then we shouldn’t use them.

Other than naming a cinematic narrator or implied author, it doesn’t seem like Chatman and Bordwell have much of a feud. Bordwell doesn’t deny the existence of unreliability, overarching principles and a governing design in films. He just doesn’t want to add another belle to the terminology ball. And, really, who can blame him? My head is spinning as it is.

In other Bordwell news, I found his explanation of character narrators and flashbacks very helpful to articulate my feelings about Leland’s bit of Citizen Kane and the alternating narrators of The Prestige. 

Bordwell argues,

One way to justify and clarify the breakup of chronology is to assign a character to tell another about what led up to the current state of affairs. A scene showing the character launching on the tale prompts your understanding that what follows is a flashback. It doesn’t matter that nobody could tell an event with the sort of detail we find in the images shown in the flashback. Nor is there any scandal in the fact hat the narrating character didn’t witness the events that we’re going to see. All that matters is that a scene calls forth in us a mental schema, people tell one another about an event that has occurred, and that triggers only one relevant inference: A time shift is coming up.

In my film history discussion of Citizen Kane last Friday, my peers were incredibly attached to the idea that the characters frame narrating the flashbacks were affecting that flashback’s representation in terms of their subjectivity. Basically, that was a wordy way of saying that they thought Leland’s subjective view of Kane was directly represented in the breakfast sequence. I disagreed at the time, and now I have a Bordwell in my pocket to explain why. Leland never saw the breakfasts. Even if he had, he couldn’t have related it in depth, perspective and surround sound, as we experience it. As I read Bordwell, I found myself agreeing that, in the case of Citizen Kane, the six narrators primarily serve as triggers for the flashbacks and nothing more. I am not saying that there are no moments of subjectivity, because there are (for example, the doubled opera opening). Only that if a character book-ends the flashback, if doesn’t necessarily follow that the character is relating events from their perspective. It is the film that relates information to build our perception of Kane in a specific fashion. 

In the case of The Prestige, I think this concept also holds true. Many of the embedded flashbacks were not motivated by the journals or the court case. We can attempt to slot them into one of these character narrator’s stories, or we can posit the film as relating these incidents (be it cinematic narrator or formal devices). I can envision an argument where the omissions of the journals are actually omissions of the film to create a more powerful reveal of twin brothers and clones. Am I reading this wrong? What do you all think?

Seriality in Narrative

We’ve talked a lot about how the viewer is considered active in Bordwell’s model. They use schemata to evaluate the information provided by syuzhet and style to construct fabula. The viewer makes assumption, inferences and hyptheses, which are then proved or disproved when the narrative provides more depth, range and communicativeness. And now that I’ve gone through all the buzz words …

Watching one episode of The Singing Detective per week has meant that we’ve roughly followed the mode by which it would have shown on television. The narrative seems to be deliberately designed to make use of the time between viewings, in fact, in some ways it requires this time of reflection and hypothesis testing. It is only when I thought back on the deluge of fabula moments that I could make the connections necessary to realize the same actor was playing different characters, or the slight changes made in a scene during it’s second enactment (or recounted enactment). My comprehension of the show largely depended on these rest periods. 

In this sense, watching two episodes back to back this past week felt slightly disruptive. I didn’t have enough time to properly process the information in the previous episode, and ended up being slightly confused on Thursday. On some level it might be considered easier to keep the details of a show straight if it is watched on DVD, instead of it’s intended medium. It seems few television shows these days are really designed for the television format, and, in fact, are better when consumed like a very long film. 24 and Lost come to mind in this regard. But, for me anyway, The Singing Detective is best viewed as it was intended to be viewed: with the week long break between screenings.

Constructing Narrative in Political Campaigns

Right now, like many, I have politics on the brain. A lot. And what better way to vent my obsession than to examine the deliberate construction of personas (characters) for our favorite political figures of the day in my blog? I’m going to try to leave my beliefs out of it as much as possible so this doesn’t disintegrate into an argument over war accessorizing (everyone has a bracelet, what are we, five?). Anyways …

Getting into campaign commercials and smear articles would be really complicated, so instead I’ll apply Bordwell’s narrational principles to the single unit of last Thursday’s vice-presidential debate. 

The temporal construction of the narrative of the debate is actually quite complicated when I seriously thought about categorizing it according to Bordwell’s terms. Where does the fabula or syuzhet begin and end? For Biden, the beginning appears to be when he first took public office, but Palin’s fabula (even including her career as a mother) doesn’t extend that far into the past. Add that both are constructing character personas for themselves and the character of their running-mates, and we’ve got a mess. Some simplification is certainly in order.

During the screen duration of the debate, there was a lot of recounting of past fabula events, and none of the recounting can really be attributed to an objective narrator. Both Palin and Biden deliberately obscured their own fabula past in favor of recounting their opponent’s or the candidates’. On other occasions Palin and Biden argued over the truth of the recounting. Frequency came into play as numerous fabula events (particularly voting records and tax plans) were recounted multiple times. The screen time and syuzhet time were the same, but the fabula duration was radically condensed. Frequency of recounting accorded some fabula events more importance than others, the war in Iraq being one of the most prominent. 

I think I’m using these terms right for this situation. The fabula includes entire political careers, the syuzhet the two characters in a debate. The characters of McCain and Obama are created and challenged by both sides, but never physically manifest in the narrative. By selectively recounting a vote statistic, Palin could omit the fabula information that McCain voted the same way as Biden. The only point about which I am confused is where to place the fabula beginning. Are there two fabulas, one for Palin and one for Biden, beginning separately? And how does their interaction narratively with their running-mates personas affect their narrative?

The “Twist” Genre and the Crying Game

Bordwell’s definitions of fabula and syuzhet help illuminate exactly how the “twist” genre, as explored by Erlend Lavik, operates. Typically in these films (and if memory serves, The Sixth Sense is no exception), the syuzhet is deliberately constructed so as to encourage the viewer to ask the wrong questions and thus arrive at the wrong fabula. Then, near the end, the “twist” occurs, which exposes the mis-construction of the fabula. 

This strategy is what is at work in “Walkabout.” The syuzhet and style both conspire to mislead the viewer into believing that Locke can walk, and his illness lies elsewhere. Then the “twist” occurs, at which point the syuzhet reveals key fabula information: Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane accident. This causes a re-ordering of the fabula by the viewer to accommodate this new information. Using other Bordwell terminology, the viewer made assumptions about Locke’s mobility, inferred something was wrong with him and hypothesized he was sick before the trip. But each of these operations is rendered wrong by the twist (in other Bordwell terms, the new prototype schemata).

Lavik cites the example of The Crying Game in his article. I find this an interesting comparison to the rest of the twist cycle. When The Sixth Sense came out, critics went nuts over the twist. While I don’t remember any explicit articles “ruining” the movie, there was plenty of talk about the syuzhet and how deliberately constructed it was. In contrast, when my mom gave me The Crying Game for some holiday or other a while back, she explained that at the time of it’s release, nobody would talk about the film at all. Granted, the content of the twist is a lot more controversial. Not only is torture, murder and revolution commonplace in the fabula, the girlfriend turns out to be a transvestite. Bit of a nasty surprise for the protagonist, and it does require a fabulous rethinking of the entire film.

There seems to be a common theme in all these films. Like “Walkabout” the twist in The Crying Game works only because the viewer pre-consciously, or perhaps even unconsciously, makes an assumption that unless explicitly visually stated, all characters are what they look like, that is, functioning, gendered, human beings. Thus we assume that the girlfriend is, in fact, a girl, and that Locke can walk. This same assumption seems to be at work in The Sixth Sense. 

I hope some of this made some sense … I apologize if it didn’t. I am currently suffering the Middlebury mega-virus of the month …