Showing papers by "David Bordwell published in 2013"

Principles of Narration

Abstract: My account of Rear Window does not constitute a critical interpretation. I have not labeled Jeff a voyeur, judged his peeping nice or naughty, or sought to establish him as a "castrated" adventurer fantasizing the dismembering of a woman's body. Indeed, my sketch is not even an analysis of the film, since specifying the spectator's activity cannot itself provide that. For the viewer, constructing the story takes precedence; the effects of the text are registered, but its causes go unremarked. This is not to say that these activities are, strictly speaking, unconscious; most work of narrative comprehension seems to occur in what Freud called the preconscious, the realm of elements "capable of entering consciousness." The spectator simply has no concepts or terms for the textual elements and systems that shape responses. It is the job of theory to construct them, the job of analysis to show them at work. A full theory of narration must be able to specify the objective devices and forms that elicit the spectator's activity. That is the task of this and the next three chapters. Theory must also go beyond the perceiver's relation to the text by situating the text within contexts of which the perceiver is seldom explicitly aware. These contexts are historical ones, and I shall consider those most pertinent to narration in Part 3. What an account of the spectator's work has taught us is that theory and analysis must explain not only localized effects but whole films, treating them as eliciting the spectator's ongoing construction of the story. Eisenstein's advice to his students holds good for the study of narration as textual form: "Think in stages of a process." From this chapter forward, my focus is on how film form and style function in relation to narrational strategies and ends. As an alternative, we could undertake empirical investigations of how actual spectators construe particular films. While worthwhile, this enterprise would not necessarily lead to insights into how films encourage, sustain, block, or undercut specific viewing operations. As I have said throughout, formal systems both cue and