"There are two basic ways in which a narrative situates the information it provides about the narrated world. Either the narrative presents (the narrator reports) what some (one or more) of the entities in that world are perceiving of the situations and events narrated ("She heard people speaking a strange language") or it does not ("As the weather was very fine, the people on the farm had dined more quickly than usual, and had returned to the fields"). P. 44
"Note also that the entities can but need not be characters: everything may be presented in terms of a nonanthropomorphic instrument - say, a camera - located in the narrated world (the narrated diegesis). Of course, the same or different situations and events can be presented according to the "perceptions" of the same or different entities (giving rise to cases which, following Genette, we might differentiate as fixed, variable, and multiple focalization)." P. 44
"Not only can one focalizer (reflector, centerof consciousness, or holder of a point of view) yield to another one within the space of a few words (as in "John watched Mary, whostared back at him, wishing he would stop") but focalization itself may obtain and then vanish from one sentence to the next or even within a single sentence ("Jane saw Robert and thought that he looked tired: she did not know that he was faking")." P.45
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Els Andringa, Petra van Horssen, Astrid Jacobs, and Ed Tan
Ok, there was an extremely interesting chapter in the book where an investigation was put in place where one film was changed slightly. Ugh, it's going to be so hard to explain.
The film is called Emma Zunz and the premise behind it is Emma's father, who had fled to South America after being accused of stealing money from the company that Emma works at, has committed suicide. She begins reading through newspaper clippings and old letter he had sent her in the past. One of these letters is her father claiming that the person who actually took the money was her boss. A whole plan is set in motion, she calls her boss to meet to discuss a strike that is being planned by her fellow workers, she then goes to a bar and sells herself to a sailor. Afterwards, she goes to meet her boss at the factory and they begin discussing the strike. Emma then fakes a collapse and her boss rushes to get her water. While he is out of the office, Emma searches around the desk quickly and pulls a gun out from one of the draws. As the boss returns with a glass of water, Emma shoots him and tells him that this is revenge for her father. She then calls the police, telling them that she had shot her boss after he had attempted to sexually abuse her.
It's a good premise but from what i've just read, the film isn't that impressive. The test that the three contributors conducted was this:
"It is our aim here to investigate how different modes of focalization influence the way in which viewers perceive and empathize with a character. In an experiment , focalization was systematically varied from external to internal by means of a VO, while the cinematic narrator was kept constant. The VO-versions implied the addition of an overt, in one version extradiegetic, in the other version intradiegetic narrator...We expect that internal focalization (with viewers having maximal access to what and how a character sees, feels, and thinks) will produce in the audience a clearer image of that character's personality and state of mind, as well as a higher sensitivity to the character's emotions. As a consequence, it will be easier for spectators to infer what a character does or plans to do." P. 136
The majority of this chapter is just their investigation that reads like a science experiment with graphs and conclusions and numbers...bleh! Anyway, the results were not what they expected. Anyway, I think i'm just going to start typing up quotes and if I feel an urge to explain and talk like I did with Unheard Melodies then i'll do that at a later point.
"The category of point-of-view is one of the most important means of structuring narrative discourse and one of the most powerful mechanisms for audience manipulation" (Stam, Burgoyne, Flitterman-Lewis, 1992: P.84)P.133
"Though the "point of view" originally refers to the point in space from where a spectator perceives (Bordwell 1985), it also means the observational attitudes (Tan 1996) that people bring to look upon states of things, events, or other people." P.134
"An assumption often taken for granted is that the degree to which viewers sympathize with a character. However, such intuitions that are often vaguely expressed in analyses and interpretations, lack empirical evidence." P. 135
"First, there are modes of narration based on the position of the narrating agent. Narrators can be invisible respectively inaudible, in terms of Chatman (1978) "covert," in language or images. However, they become manifest in all devices of presentation that select, construct, or organize information. Such is mostly the case in conventional third-person stories and films. The narrator can also be audibly present without participating in the story. Such an "overt" narrator may, for example, comment on what is told or shown. Because overt narrators are not an element of the story or "diegesis" they are telling , they are called "extradiegetic." There are, however, also narrators who are characters in the story that is told as well. Such is the case in an embedded narrative, where a character presented by the extradiegetic narrator tells a story. This narrator is called "intradiegetic.
A second aspect, called "focalization," is the more literal "point-of-seeing"; it concerns the question who is the subject who does the seeing, feeling, and thinking. In case of external focalization it is the narrator's observation that is mediated: characters are shown through the gaze and interpretation of the narrator. In case of internal focalization things and events are presented from the consciousness of a character within the story. In former case readers-viewers seem to look at the characters from the outside, in the latter to loo with them from the inside.
Most of these concepts have originally been developed for literary texts. Gradually, they have been modified for and extended to film. Recently, Chatman (1990, chap. 8) has suggested that one must distinguish for the medium of film the cinematic narrator, the agent who actually shows a film in its visual (and audio) arrangement by all filmic devices used, like, for example, mise-en-scéne, editing, lighting, and camera-angle and -movement and sound. The cinematic narrator can be distinguished from a narrator who verbally tells the story by means of voice-over (VO). This distinction clearly shows that film has various "channels" for presenting information and also various devices for implying points of view. Points of view can even be doubled. The "cinematic narrator" may show a piece of scenery from a certain angle, eventually focalize a character, while an off-screen extra- or intra-diegetic overt narrator relates or comments by means of a VO." P.134-135
"In film research, empirical evidence of the effects of narrative devices is practically nonexistent. We know of only one study in which a film's narration was manipulated : Böhm (1990) reports the results of an experiment in which four different versions of the exposition phase were presented, followed by an identical middle part and ending. The expositions varied as to the relative prominence of the film's two protagonists, a man and a woman. Pronounced effects were found on the perceived importance of the protagonists in the film's middle part.
Psychologists studying empathy have successfully manipulated viewers' perspective and emotion by giving different instructions before showing them a film (e.g., Davis et al. 1987 and Zillmann & Cantor 1977). None of these studies, however, manipulated or even identified a well-defined narrative device." P. 133
OK, I think I quite possibly may be quoted out on this chapter, the whole book too actually. I still need to update my TLA but i'll do that tomorrow after I look at some rushes worth importing.
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