This week’s readings explore the concepts of narrators, authors, and implied authors. What’s your take on how useful these ideas are for moving image media? Where do you see the narrator or implied author being particularly helpful for analyzing examples we’ve watched? Are there examples where it’s not useful?
And FYI – here’s the cigarette ad that Chatman discusses at length:
I might be forgetting that this was mentioned in the reading but, as much as I agree with the idea of narrative texts taking on their own meanings for different people, I find it impossible to outright deny the author’s or director’s intent as having a place in the meaning of a narrative text. Certainly an author’s intent and the intent created as a result of the implied author don’t always overlap but I’m sure there must be instances where they do. For example, Annie Hall is extremely biographical and many of the fabula events have specific meanings tied to Woody Allen. To me, saying that an implied author created the film’s intent is not accurate enough. Neither is the idea of career authorship because of how rooted the film is in Allen’s life and looking at his other work does not communicate this.
I’m not really sure how useful the idea of the implied narrator is. I feel almost as if it is just giving a name to something that we already actively do. The implied author does not actively construct the syuzhet as the implied author is just as constructed as the syuzhet is. It exists in order to explain illogical and unreliable actions/events, something that viewers do anyways as they watch the movie. Whatever meaning or intent I draw from a narrative text as a viewer may be identical to that of a different viewer but it is still a personal action that I actively do while watching a movie. If anything, the viewer is the implied author because it is the viewer who decides why something has occurred. There doesn’t seem to be a need to make a step in the construction of fabula that viewers carry out themselves its own separate piece of narrative theory. I don’t think I’ve clearly communicated why I don’t see the implied author as particularly useful, but maybe I missed the point of the implied author in the readings.
I do agree with the readings that it is useful for separating the actual author from work to prevent the abhorring of an author for the content of a text. This is useful in Lonestar, where I find it doubtful that John Sayles is advocating for incest as long as it is in the name of love. There is clearly some other reason for that occurring in the movie, which I have not quite figured out yet.
Following up on that, I agree with Matt’s point about the implied author being merely another name–maybe an anthropomorphism–for something much more basic. I think the implied author is the entity that film theorists feel they must impute into a narrative, when what they are really talking about is a sense of unity–unity that can that they understand as coming from one principle teller. In other words, when people say that a film has an implied author, what they really mean is that it has the coherence and unity one would ascribe to a singular source, or singular teller. More than that, it originates somewhere, and is being conveyed to you. Otherwise it would not be perceived as a narrative.
I definitely think that implied narration is an inevitable element of viewing films. Whenever I’m reading something or watching a movie, I can’t help but create ideas about the author as I interpret it, whether I’m conscious of this or not. For example, I will often read books and then be surprised when I see what the author looks like in the back. Even though I thought I was simply reading the book, I didn’t even realize I had an idea about the author until I was surprised by the picture. This has also happened to me when I watch DVD commentary from movie writers or directors.
I love Chatman’s example of the cigarette ad, in which our confusion compels us to wonder all the possible scenarios that are taking place as well as the intent of the advertisers. This is also the interesting question to me about Trapped in the Closet: how did R. Kelly think of this? And why does he keep doing it?
I find the author debate interesting. Barthes wants to abolish the author in order to preserve the text as a pure experience independent of its creator–to ‘save the reader.’ Once the text has been created, it is out of the author’s hands. Foucault wants to salvage the author and his significance for interpreting the text. He writes with respect to the author’s name that “it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.” The author does not disappear where interpretation of the text is concerned; instead he “seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being.”
I fall in the Foucault camp. How often do we refer to a film by prefacing it with its director? We say, “Oh this is a Woody Allen film,” or “this is a … film.” The author (in many cases, the director) circumscribes our experience of the narrative. And no matter how hard we may try to watch the work on its own merits, i.e. the text alone divested of its creator, we just can’t do it. We talked about this phenomenon in reference to Shyamalan. But this is the downside to the authorial presence: Viewers come to expect things from authors, and authors tend to oblige. They get to a point where it would be downright confusing for them to break radically with their usual style. The moral of the story, i think, is that the author is in fact present in the work, but that this isn’t necessarily a good thing–it can stifle creativity. In Barthes’s scheme the author has the luxury of anonymity, allowing boundless imaginative play. Not so in Foucault’s scheme, which demands authorial consistency.
The implied author works for me when we’re talking about a situation where multiple creators contributed to the final product (ie. basically most movies) because I understand that as a viewer, you feel as if a sole entity is telling you the story, not an entire committee.
Chatman goes a step further and discourages us from thinking of the implied author as a person at all, and that’s where he starts to lose me. There’s a reason that so many people make the mistake of attributing a work to a single author–they create the singular implied author in their head while they’re consuming the work. I think the implied author is in the mind of the viewer, not in the text. So I’m confused by Chatman’s equating the implied author with “text intent.” Is there only one text intent? His critique of readers’ ideologies on p.99 seems to be arguing that there is. (Matt, I like your point, “If anything, the viewer is the implied author because it is the viewer who decides why something has occurred.”) I think Chatman’s giving the implied author too much power for something that’s less relevant when there is a clear singular author whose thoughts come across clearly.
I find the collaboration debate very true in Chatman’s writings and I can’t help but be reminded of films coming out on DVD with “Director’s Cuts” as a way to bypass the studio and the editors in order to facilitate more of a voice in his or her work. I remember when reading that article about how Annie Hall was actually a different film before the editing process went into full gear and made the movie mostly about Annie and not all of Allen’s lovers. I also agree with Matt in that the viewer is very much an implied author, and the Red Badge of Courage example in the book supports that argument in so far as they actually changed part of the film as a result of audience reaction. Authorship appears to be based upon influence upon influence upon influence, so it is very hard to distinguish authors.
I found the ad example very humorous and I feel that the viewer having to make assumptions about slightly ambiguous narration has given rise to something we all love to create and view: parodies.