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Narrative and the Moving Image

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Abstract

This chapter applies a rhetorical-functionalist approach to several problems in the philosophy of narrative in the moving image. Drawing on the work of Meir Sternberg, the first section defines narrative in terms of three temporal effects: prospection, retrospection, and re-cognition. The second section argues that this orientation highlights the modality of narrative, asking us to look beyond the causal chain to consider events that might happen but do not. The third section expands the focus beyond film to include television, where many narratives are told in serial form, and the fourth section addresses the problem of the narrator. While offering tentative support for the “implied author” concept, the essay argues against the concept of the cinematic narrator.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jerrold Levinson and Philip Alperson, “What Is a Temporal Art?,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 441.

  2. 2.

    On the differences between the story-discourse pair and the fabula/syuzhet pair, see Seymour Chatman, “Towards a Theory of Narrative,” <Emphasis Type="Italic">New Literary History 6, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 295–296.

  3. 3.

    Meir Sternberg, “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm,” Poetics Today 31, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 636.

  4. 4.

    Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 637.

  5. 5.

    Eyal Segal, “The ‘Tel-Aviv School’: A Rhetorical-Functional Approach to Narrative,” Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Greta Olson (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 302.

  6. 6.

    Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 640–641. Sternberg’s definition of suspense is admittedly broad, and some readers might prefer to use “prospection” as a less emotionally laden term. For a more narrowly targeted theory, see Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–117.

  7. 7.

    Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 641.

  8. 8.

    Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 641.

  9. 9.

    David Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style, 1917–1960,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13.

  10. 10.

    Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style,” 37.

  11. 11.

    On recent puzzle films and twist films, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 73–82.

  12. 12.

    V.F. Perkins, “Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction,” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 26.

  13. 13.

    Perkins, “Where Is the World?”, 26.

  14. 14.

    Perkins, “Where Is the World?”, 26.

  15. 15.

    Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 156.

  16. 16.

    I discuss Prince and Ryan elsewhere in Patrick Keating, “Narrative Dynamics and the Competitive Reality Show,” Storyworlds 5 (2013): 55–75.

  17. 17.

    Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22, no. 1 (1988): 2.

  18. 18.

    Meir Sternberg, “If-Plots: Narrativity and the Law-Code,” in Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 34.

  19. 19.

    As Eyal Segal explains, “A successful conclusion of the investigation thus resolves the curiosity gaps about the crime mystery—and simultaneously the suspense gaps regarding the course of the investigation.” See Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 167.

  20. 20.

    David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 171–187.

  21. 21.

    Inbar Shaham, “The Structure of Repetition in the Cinema: Three Hollywood Genres,” Poetics Today 34, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 442.

  22. 22.

    Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 136.

  23. 23.

    Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 137–138.

  24. 24.

    Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 17.

  25. 25.

    Newman, “From Beats to Arcs,” 17.

  26. 26.

    Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89.

  27. 27.

    Noël Carroll, “As the Dial Turns: Notes on Soap Operas,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121.

  28. 28.

    Newman, “From Beats to Arcs,” 16.

  29. 29.

    Jason Gendler, “The Rich Inferential World of Mad Men: Serialized Television and Character Interiority,” Projections 10, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 40.

  30. 30.

    Andrew McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 2 (April 2013): 165.

  31. 31.

    McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” 165.

  32. 32.

    McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” 178.

  33. 33.

    Ben Caplan, “Serial Fiction, Continued,” British Journal of Aesthetics 54, no. 1 (January 2014): 73; Lee Walters, “Serial Fiction, the End?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 3 (July 2015): 337. Thanks to Andrew Kania for pointing me toward this interesting debate.

  34. 34.

    Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 95–134.

  35. 35.

    Marie-Laure Ryan, “Transfictionality across Media,” in Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 388–392.

  36. 36.

    Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 133.

  37. 37.

    David Bordwell, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,” Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 122.

  38. 38.

    George M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 126.

  39. 39.

    Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film, 54.

  40. 40.

    Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film, 89.

  41. 41.

    For a survey of approaches, see Catharine Abell and Katarina Bantinaki, “Introduction,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. Abell and Bantinaki (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–23.

  42. 42.

    Robert Stecker, “Film Narration, Imaginative Seeing, and Seeing-In,” Projections 7, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 147–154.

  43. 43.

    Katherine Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 1 (January 2007): 78.

  44. 44.

    Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator,” 90.

  45. 45.

    Douglas Pye, “Seeing Fictions in Film,” Projections 7, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 137.

  46. 46.

    Douglas Pye, “Movies and Tone,” in Close-Up 02, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 30.

  47. 47.

    Douglas Pye, “Movies and Point of View,” Movie 36 (2000): 2. Pye makes this comment in the context of his discussion of George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

  48. 48.

    Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy, and Romance in Hollywood Film (Moffat, UK: Cameron and Hollis, 2000), 20.

  49. 49.

    Bordwell, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,” 122.

  50. 50.

    Pye, “Seeing Fictions in Film,” 136.

  51. 51.

    See the chapter on cinematic authorship in Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–151.

  52. 52.

    Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 125.

  53. 53.

    Gregory Currie, Narratives & Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49. See also Murray Smith’s discussion of the “referential” and “formal” aspects of a film, in Smith, “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 289.

  54. 54.

    For a summary of the theory of integration, see Meir Sternberg and Tamar Yacobi, “(Un)reliability in Narrative Discourse: A Comprehensive Overview,” Poetics Today 36, no. 4 (December 2015), 402–412.

  55. 55.

    Meir Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence,” Poetics Today 33, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2012): 413.

  56. 56.

    Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation,” 368.

  57. 57.

    Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation,” 411.

  58. 58.

    Sternberg and Currie differ on other points, for instance, on the need for a narrator as mediator.

  59. 59.

    H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 85.

  60. 60.

    For an introduction to these debates, see the following: on unreliable narration, Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 260–280; on interactive narration, Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 224–243; on (and against) imagination, Derek Matravers, Fiction and Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 146–157.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Patrick Keating

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  1. Patrick Keating
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  1. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Noël Carroll

  2. William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Laura T. Di Summa

  3. Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Shawn Loht

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Keating, P. (2019). Narrative and the Moving Image. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_6

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