Film Narrator and the Early American Screenwriting Manuals (original) (raw)
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Review: Warren Buckland, Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling
Frames Cinema Journal
Warren Buckland's monograph Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling is a succinct look at the intricacies of narrative, narration, and other critical storytelling devices in film. The author provides terminology, concepts, and properties that enable the reader to unlock how stories are told cinematically making what is often rendered an opaque process by filmmakers, easy to comprehend. The book, is part of the Short Cuts series, that provides introductions to a myriad of topics in Film Studies for both film scholars and those simply interested in film. Indeed, Buckland's book in addition to being a key scholarly text, is also an indispensable tool for the screenwriter. The clarity it provides on topic of narrative, would strengthen any writer's knowledge of the mechanics of storytelling. Starting with the history of early cinema, in chapter one, Buckland takes the reader on an immersive dive into early modes of narration-from "intertitles, primitive narrators, voyeurcharacters" (8) and how they "contribute to the transition from the cinema of attractions to the cinema of narrative integration" (8). A scene from The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) explores the tension between the director's "attempt to develop a narrative scene" (6) and lingering notions of "attraction" found in early cinema (ibid).
2018
This article focuses on the imitation of film form in cinematic novels and short stories on the level of narrative discourse and introduces the concept of 'para-cinematic narrator'. The author compares the temporality expressed by verbal tenses in literature and the temporality expressed through film semiosis. The connection between film and literary fiction is explored in terms of foreground and background narrative style. It is argued that the articulation of narrative foreground and background-i. e. the "narrative relief" (Weinrich 1971)-in film form tends to favour the foreground style, and that such narrative relief is 'flattened' due to the "monstrative" quality (Gaudreault 2009) of the medium. This flattening is remediated in strongly cinematised fiction and conveyed through the use of verbal tenses. The imitation of montage and specific cinematic techniques is conceived, consequently, as a separate feature that can integrate into this remediated, para-cinematic temporality. Finally, the author recalls the concept of "mode" in genre theory (Fowler 2002), which describes a "distillation" of traits from one genre to another. With the category of cinematic mode the remediation of basic traits from film to literary fiction can be framed in terms of genre-related discourses.
Self-reflexivity, Description, and the Boundaries of Narrative Cinema
This article proposes a bridge between an early and a late work of Gérard Genette, namely his article Frontières du récit (1966) and his collection of essays Fiction et Diction (1991). In Frontières du récit, Genette pointed at two instances of “anti- narrative” intrusion into narrative. The one is what Emile Benveniste called “discourse”, meaning the self-reflexive comments of the narrator, and the other is description, a mode of utterance that, when found in a narrative, temporarily withholds the flow of the story. In the context of the proliferation of these instances in current narrative films, and in the light of Genette’s observations in Fiction et Diction, I will suggest that these anti- narrative elements provide us with a chance to fundamentally reconsider the notion of narrative and to configure a paradigm shift in narratology, which Genette had already foreseen in his early work.
The Narrator: A Historical and Epistemological Approach to Narrative Theory
Sylvie Patron, ed., Optional Narrator Theories: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, "Frontiers of Narrative", 2021
This article falls within the sphere of the history of linguistic theories, as it is understood by the so-called “French school”: closely related to epistemology, more than to pure historiography. It also belongs to a discipline or field of research which does not yet exist in literary disciplines as a whole: the history and epistemology of literary theories. The two disciplines share a common condition, which is that recent theories often fall victim to being overlooked in the same way as old theories do, an oversight which is not necessarily linked to their falsification or inclusion within a more general theory. In this article, narrator theories (the theory of the existence of a fictional narrator in all fictional narratives or pan-narrator theory, and optional-narrator theory or theories) will be placed within the wider framework of the history of literary theories and of the complex relationship it entertains with linguistics. The first section will offer a brief chronology of the question of the narrator and narrative enunciation in the modern era. This will be discussed in more detail in the subsequent sections. The aim is to pull back the veil on a certain number of received ideas, for example the idea that narrative theory acquired scientific status (under the name of narratology) with the recognition of the existence of a fictional narrator in all fictional narratives. We will show on the contrary the confusions and errors that narratologists commit when they present the concept of the narrator or related and associated concepts. We will also note the general presentism of narrative theory. The fact, for example, that a coherent theory of narration (of the narrator and narrative enunciation) was already available in 1804 is of hardly any importance to classical and current narratologists, no more than to current proponents of optional-narrator theories.
A Brief History of the Idea of Narrative
In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic. This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.