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Why talk about non-narrative?
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: To broach a subject
and isolate a problem that most film criticism represses,
stumbles over, or refuses to acknowledge, preferring to stick
to the authoritarian guidelines of the synopsis and the plot
summary. "Telling a story" -- the task that for
many critics is the only game in town twenty-four hours a
day, 365 days a year -- becomes a singular grid through which
all the diverse structures and operations of movies can theoretically
be apprehended, codified, and converted into meanings. The
implicit suggestion that nothing important can elude this
structural model of plot -- acting, editing, direction, theme,
social relevance -- becomes a self-serving prophecy that freezes
film analysis into a monotonous treadmill of tautologies.
The question is, does this correspond invariably to the way
that nonspecialized viewers look at movies, or is it a model
that exists in order to facilitate the critic’s work?
The synopsis that is handed out at press screenings only to
be regurgitated or adapted into reviews (and related marketing
devices) clearly bypasses a complex set of experiences that
every spectator has, but few are able to articulate in critical
frameworks.
RAYMOND DURGNAT: If you ask most people
to synopsize a film after they’ve seen it, they’re
completely lost. It’s a skill that critics learn, often
badly, over the years, and I very much doubt whether the ordinary
member of the audience remembers the plot structure as a whole
in the way in which criticism implies that it does. Half the
people in the audience have as much a pictorial eye as a narrative
eye.
JR: Peter Gidal addresses a related question
when he complains about several critics interpreting even
Michael Snow films in relation to narrative models. The problem
is, Gidal’s definitions and descriptions of non-narrative
structures are nearly all negative indications. What we need
are some positive ones.
RD: If we made a checklist on non-narrative
dimensions of film, most of them would be familiar. We know
about visual composition, plastic values, editing structures,
intellectual structures, music, and so on. The only disadvantage
these non-narrative elements have is the difficulty of briefly
verbalizing them. One can summarize a plot in one sentence,
whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame.
DAVID EHRENSTEIN: That depends. The screen
can be filled with enormous amounts of detail, as in Visconti,
and about all it amounts to is "Street outside the house
with people passing." On the other hand, shots that contain
only a single object can be impossible to summarize easily.
As Christian Metz says, a shot of a gun can never be read
by the spectator simply as "gun"; at the very least,
the shot constitutes "Here is a gun." And the reason
for that is context. The shot comes from somewhere (even if
it’s the first shot of the film), and is going somewhere
else. Of course most of the time a shot of a gun -- which
is to say in most cases a hand holding a gun -- is merely
functional in the scene.
Sometimes shots like this can work in another manner. The
little tin of something-or-other held up by a hand at the
beginning of Rameau’s Nephew is impossible
to pin down for a particular reading, because it appears only
to vanish into nothing -- it never returns again or is alluded
to in any other context in the rest of the film. In other
cases, such as Robbe-Grillet’s films, the backgrounds
in which the objects are placed keep shifting and affecting
meaning as a result. In Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir,
a blue shoe and a broken wine glass move around so much that
all potential meaning for them is abolished. Lubitsch does
something similar in his films. Consider the purse in Trouble
in Paradise: as it changes hands its meaning in the film
changes. But the effect reached is toward a gradual accumulation
of meaning with no end in sight.
JR: Obviously, part of the problem in summarizing
individual frames is terminology, which feeds back into the
question of context. How does one distinguish between action
and event, for instance? Is it a matter of defining units?
RD: No, it’s a question of defining
relations. Semiologists often assume that you start from units
and then define the relationships between them by certain
syntactical procedures. But the alternative approach, taken
from structuralism in the life sciences, or Gestalt psychology,
or many different positions in philosophy, is that units are
only phases in structures. You don’t start from the
unit, you start from the structure ... You have to distinguish
among movement, action, event, and narrative. They’re
four completely different things, or rather the last three
shade into each other. But time and time again people imply
that movement entails narrative, making film a mainly narrative
act. Yet movement often isn’t even action. All the leaves
moving around on a tree don’t constitute as many narratives
as there are leaves.
DE: It was really nice to read Gilbert Adair’s
Paris Journal in the March-April FILM COMMENT, where
he mentions in passing his fascination with the color of Cary
Grant’s socks in the crop-dusting sequence of North
by Northwest. For what it proves isn’t that Adair
is nodding at the switch -- not paying attention during one
of the most famous set pieces in movie history -- but rather
that he’s really on the ball. For what’s involved
is his awareness of other elements within the film, and his
willingness to deal with them, regardless of the fact that
such dealing goes against the grain of the film’s
affectivity.
The North by Northwest example is especially important,
as it’s a moment of prime audience "involvement"
when the economy of narrative articulation is functioning
at its most ruthless pace. If films were only their narratives,
only their stories, such things wouldn’t be possible.
And the fact that they are possible isn’t something
to be swept under the rug or ignored as irrelevant, but rather
investigated in as thoroughgoing a manner as possible. For
what’s at stake is the relative autonomy of the spectator
on the one hand, and the actual process of his intellection
of elements on the other -- something that diagesis-bound
semiotic studies (such as Stephen Heath’s on Touch
of Evil) haven’t really been willing to come to
grips with. Heath shows how everything can be returned or
translated into the story. He notes a few loose ends or gray
areas, but that’s all.
JR: At least he begins to acknowledge part
of the problem when he quotes diverse synopses of Touch
of Evil and demonstrates the inadequacy of each. From
this point of view, my two and a half years on the staff of
Monthly Film Bulletin, where every review is preceded
by a detailed synopsis, was very instructive. Readers of the
magazine who believe that it should stick only to credits
and synopses, and omit the reviews, always seem to assume
that the former represent data that are objective, while the
latter are subjective. Yet from a material point of view,
all three categories are subjective selections of data, funneled
through specific channels that are anything but neutral. The
point at which writing a synopsis became interesting was when
I was reviewing Wavelength and used the form as a
means of posing the question "What are the contents of
this movie?" -- a crucial question that has to be asked
on some level before it can be reviewed coherently.
When the synopsis straightjacket became impossible, an actual
form of censorship, was when I had to impose it on Dreyer’s
Vampyr, a movie that can be read as a paraphrasable
story only if one ignores all the syntactical contradictions
in its construction. Thanks to my own subliterary training,
this is an aspect of the film that I was literally unable
to see (or hear) until I started examining the film closely.
A plot summary in this case represents a refusal
to look at the film closely, a smoothing over and flattening
out of all the discontinuities that confuse the spectator’s
unconscious bridgework with the actual substance of Vampyr.
There are many other narrative films in this category, films
that can be synopsized only if one omits precisely what makes
them interesting, reading a new text through the tinted lenses
of older texts: Gertrud, Mizoguchi’s The
Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era, Persona,
Playtime, Une Simple Histoire. Doing a synopsis
of Je t’aime, je t’aime means concentrating
on the clumsy s-f framing device and trying to reconstruct
an inner plot out of the scrambled and fragmented chronology
-- none of which comes within miles of dealing with what the
film’s about, or what its deepest sources of pleasure
are.
RD: I don’t think anybody would pretend
that dealing with Dreyer in terms of narrative was adequate.
Everybody has a sense that here we are with these visual chunks,
the way chunks strike chunks or the texture of muscles in
a face, or the way one face jabs at another -- it doesn’t
matter whether it’s narrative or not, what matters is
description: face as landscape. Dreyer said it. If you approach
film from painting, it’s very obvious that narrative
may be only a thread in the tapestry. In his Trilogy of Life,
Pasolini uses it like that.
DE: In The Arabian Nights, the
Ninetto sequence is protracted for an awfully long time because
Pasolini wants you to look at the actors’ faces. They’re
beautiful and should be lingered over, and the only way to
do this is to bring the narrative to a halt. Suddenly the
film begins to "give" and you can begin to get into
it in any number of ways.
This is part of the reason why much of the hysteria over
point-of-view constructs (I’m thinking especially of
Heath’s recent piece on Oshima’s In the Realm
of the Senses) is misplaced -- a busy surface texture
automatically destroys any fixed narrative line. I’m
also thinking in particular of two films I’ve seen recently:
Wenders’ The American Friend and Chytilova’s
The Apple Game. Both of them have simple "linear"
stories, but are so rich in surface texture in regard to objects,
shapes, colors, etc., that only an idiot could regard them
as "fixed" or "absolute." They’re
incredibly volatile films, their simple narrative bases making
them that much more subversive.
JR: Perhaps the narrative bias partially
comes from the way everyone’s been trained by television,
where pictorial elements are reduced to an iconography that’s
mainly designed to further the story line.
RD: Certainly in U.S. TV. It’s much
more verbal -- like radio with pictures -- where English TV
is far more pictorial. It perpetuates the difference between
the British documentarist and The March of Time.
March of Time would write the commentary first and
cut the pictures to the sentences. They even disallowed moving
camera, because of the difficulties in cutting into a moving
shot.
There’s really a traditional Hollywood style of filmmaking
that’s based on the story, and a European style which
is more discursive and atmospheric; you can see it in Renoir
and Hitchcock. Even in apparently narrative film, the entire
narrative exists largely to maneuver two or three scenes into
position to maximum effect. The narrative really has only
a framing function. It’s a static construction, essentially.
The particular scenes which are being nurtured are actually
functioning in a lyrical way. They correspond to a lyrical
poem rather than a narrative poem. It’s true that action
may go on in them, but nonetheless they’re a lyrical
description of an overall -- and in that sense, static --
situation. Hitchcock said of his English films that the central
idea was just to present a series of strong scenes, and never
mind how the people got from A to B. When he got to America,
he found everybody worrying whether the plot was plausible
or not, so he had to change his method of constructing a movie.
JR: A good example of Hitchcock’s
first manner would be the whole first part of Number Seventeen
-- even the opening shot, where the camera tracks in the same
direction as the wind past a windswept tree to follow a rolling
hat, which is pursued in turn by a man who catches it in front
of an abandoned house, where the story begins. You get this
kind of delirium of continuity throughout, and one made all
the more interesting by the fact that Hitchcock was literally
trying to put one over on the critics by running through a
nonsensical plot as rapidly as possible -- a joke that worked,
by the way, as far as contemporary reviewers were concerned.
A women who’s introduced in the film as deaf and dumb
suddenly starts to speak, with no explanation offered; a jewel
thief sneezes at a particularly tense juncture for no apparent
reason.
This kind of Lewis Carroll logic gives the film as much coherence
in a way as something like Marnie, where all the
motives get spelled out. It’s like an intensification
of the European atmospheric approach that Ray refers to above,
pushed to the point where the putative story line start to
crumble, and other kinds of continuity come in to replace
the gaps so that it’s hardly missed. A similar process
is at work in Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour
and Hawk’s The Big Sleep, and Rivette is clearly
playing with the same principles even more systematically
in Out 1: Spectre and Celine and Julie Go Boating.
DE: At this point, enter stage right the
surrealists, whose love of cinema was based on the notion
of narrative aphasia. For example, the intertitle in Nosferatu
-- "And when he crossed the bridge the shadows came to
meet him" -- cited by André Breton as having extraordinary
poetic power is simply functional on a narrative level. But
for Breton’s purpose it’s become something else.
It’s as if he simply walked in the theater at the moment
when the title flashed on the screen, read it, and left. Which
is supposedly what many of the surrealists did in regard to
films -- regarding the part at the expense of the whole, finding
it more interesting.
Some of this sort of practice can be seen in the films of
Joseph Cornell, and the films and writings of Jack Smith.
In Cornell’s Rose Hobart, a perfectly ordinary
Thirties adventure melodrama called East of Borneo
is taken and cut up into tiny bit and pieces in sequence,
all of Cornell’s own devising. So we see the actress
entering scenes, sitting down, turning to look at something
that we don’t see, playing with a monkey in a garden,
etc. The narrative is shattered and we end up in a sort of
labyrinth of narrative possibilities or poses, similar to
Marienbad or India Song of so many years
later. Interestingly, in contrast to Rose Hobart,
Bruce Conner’s A Movie -- also made from other
films -- has a strict sense of narration and order (an evocation
of dread and loathing in relation to the spectacularization
of death). Even though it’s made of disparate pieces
it forms a whole, whereas Rose Hobart, forged from
a single unit, breaks into bits and pieces.
In Smith’s films, Flaming Creatures, Normal
Love, and No President, there’s nothing
but visual spectacle, completely at the expense of narration.
He was very insistent on the spectator’s awareness of
non-narrative elements, to the point of championing the Maria
Montez films’ childish, simple-minded stories which
made the visual-spectacle aspects all the more important --
the aspects that audiences at the time were probably dealing
with the most if they went to see these films, whether they
were aware of it or not.
RD: Or let’s consider Vigo, times
three. I don’t think one could describe A Propos
de Nice as narrative. In Zero de Conduite, there
is a narrative, and it does make sense, but nonetheless
it’s just a broad structure, or rather just a drift,
and the meat is the heavy atmospherics wound around and around
the plot, at right angles to it. L’Atalante
is the most conventional, but its atmospheres, not its story,
are what make it Vigo. In the end one can’t define auteurs
by their plot patterns, but predominately, or only, by atmospheres
generated by style. That’s what Cahierism was
supposed to be about, until the "literary" Anglo-Saxon
auteurists and the verbocentric structuro-semiologists reverted
to "literary elements." Scorpio Rising
is as far from narrative as A Propos de Nice. There
are overtones of "coming together" but in the end
it’s not even clear which of the cyclists is killed.
Un Chien Andalou raises the same questions. Is the
prologue (the eye-cutting) part of the same story as the rest?
It promises to be insofar as they share a face; but they don’t
share Buñuel; and the intertitle asserting a chronological
link is crazy enough to be ironical. Spectators assume the
rest is a narrative whole, but it’s only an assumption.
The segments are related, but relationship isn’t a synonym
for narrative. And after all, as soon as we talk about "theme"
we’re accepting that the narrative itself is subordinated
to a non-narrative relationship, a structure of ideas, or
a super-entity. As when one treats a film as an auteur’s
psychodrama: chronology is subordinate to simultaneity, it’s
a dream-metaphor for structure. Even more clearly when one
thinks of the audience’s or the culture’s psychodrama.
As soon as you treat a story as symptoms of somebody’s
existing Oedipus complex, you’re denarrativizing the
narrative.
JR: What about the notion that narrative
itself is Oedipal?
RD: Edible?
DE: Yeah, like Snow says: eating is believing.
JR: Oedipal -- Barthes’ idea in The
Pleasure of the Text (which I suppose is edible, too)
of the narrative as a search for the solution to the riddle,
the identity of the father, the possession of the mother,
the binding structure that Deleuze and Guattari imply we should
start trying to live in spite of. The guiltless pursuit of
desire that they espouse is like a sensual dive into non-narrative,
a constellation of wants that shine in different directions,
make individual demands, create a stampede rather than get
herded together on one cattle car that is headed for the slaughterhouse.
That may sound like a brutal metaphor for narrative, but the
functional structure of the cattle car and the story in relation
to the occupant (whether it’s a character or a spectator)
is quite similar. Like the relation of diamond and crystal
ball to family plot in Hitchcock’s last film: each is
a container of narrative, and each narrative points ultimately
toward death (all stories have an end).
Anti-narrative, like anti-Oedipus, suggests a way to keep
things going, a polymorphous perversity that grabs at Cary
Grant’s socks or Celine and Julie’s toys, also
grasping, say, the sensual impact of a soundtrack apart from
its narrative function, or succumbing to the lure of an extra
or a prop. The collapse of narrative in Gravity’s
Rainbow is literally an anthology of methods for breaking
out of the rocket’s trajectory, or the trajectory of
the narrative, each bound for the same fatal destination.
RD: Many of the important structures of
ideas around narrative are non-narrative. And if you’re
looking to narrative to enjoy the atmospheres of the moment
as it goes, then you’re not looking for mystery. The
whole pro- or anti-Oedipus argument is very outdated. After
all, the Kleinians have loomed very large in psychoanalysis
for over twenty years, nearer thirty. They attribute paranoia
to pre-Oedipal projections onto "the bad breast."
"The other" is in the mother long before the Oedipal
father appears on the scene. It’s strange that feminists
have made so little of this approach. Maybe a richly atmospheric
narrative is a good feed at the breast. Many narratives involve
little or no suspense, certainly not of the Oedipal type.
No doubt, as Kleinians would say, a good feed quietens fantasies
about "the bad breast."
Narrative is run largely by the laws of music. When Truffaut
compares a film to a circus in which there’s a sequence
of contrasting moods, he’s absolutely right. In 42nd
Street each of the Busby Berkeley numbers is an elongation
of a static situation. They’re states lyricized rather
than sequences of actions decisively changing states. Many
writers, especially poets, begin with a feeling -- what they’ve
got to put before you is a state of mind, which in itself
is complex and simultaneous, a vertical structure but in a
sequential order. Verse form often functions as a kind of
binding over the sequentiality, by regular repetition and
rhythm.
JR: Like the action in The Blood of
a Poet, all of which is supposed to take place during
the crumbling of a chimney. It’s a kind of bracketing
of narrative that Buñuel also resorts to. In The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie you have nothing but
one story after another, but because of the way that they’re
bracketed, there are different ways you can read them, different
ways that they dovetail into one another -- become or don’t
become part of each other -- and consequently there’s
a disintegration of a single continuous thread. Theoretically
you could say that this process takes place at one point or
another in every film, whenever one’s attention becomes
discontinuous. The synopsis is therefore not only a life preserver
for the less courageous, but a Platonic model of the way we’re
"supposed" to read films, of films as they’re
"supposed" to be read.
RD: Narrative as such has no way of handling
the presence of two Conchitas in That Obscure Object of
Desire. And they’re not just two facets of one
woman. They’re different women. Differences of physique
become differences of style, differences of style becomes
class differences. The brunette is classically proletarian,
the blonde is characteristically petit bourgeois. Then think
how Buñuel doubles the framing narrative, for no narrative
reason...
JR: What Nashville seems to promise
but doesn’t deliver is a proliferation of narrative
that deflects away from any center and spins out in all directions.
What you get instead is a drawing together, an interweaving
of all the strands into that phony climax and god-awful flag
filling up the screen -- multiple narratives boiled together
into one stew that yields a single corny premise.
RD: I like Nashville in the sense
that it’s like an Ealing Studios omnibus picture with
parallel plots. It’s rather like Derby Day
or Train of Events. The pacing of the plot is always
lost amongst a swarm of conspicuous details that have to do
with the kind of physical integrity of the scene, or act like
digressions. I find that very interesting in all of Altman.
JR: It sounds like a description of Renoir.
RD: Yes, there are Renoirian sides to Altman.
It’s almost as if the physical details on the screen
become a rhythmic structure, and the plot disappears into
the rhythmic pacing of the details, as in a mosaic. Finally
temps morts are becoming important in Hollywood,
which has finally picked up on neo-realism, and picked up
on this interesting nitty-gritty mosaic of detail. Citizens
Band is another Ealing Studios picture with parallel
plots; and it’s got an Altmanesque flatness, for the
same reason that the English cinema emphasizes supporting
actors more than stars, so it used parallel plots and omnibus
forms rather than a heavy foregrounding of a one-line hero.
DE: But parallel plots don’t stop
the flow in order to bring in other things; they just add
another flow. And both can be eroded from the inside out.
In Not Reconciled, Straub is dealing with a family-through-the-years
story -- or as Stephen Heath via Sigmund Freud would have
it, "Family Romance." We’ve see it time and
again in films like Giant and Since You Went
Away and Imitation of Life. But here we have
material that would make a solid "engrossing" two-hour
film, reduced to fifty-five minutes! The "plot"
is impossible to make sense of -- even on repeated viewings.
What you do get is a chance to deal with the gaps
in between -- narrative "overtone" so to speak.
Getting back to what Ray said about the New Hollywood, it’s
true about the temps morts, but how morts
can they be with Jack Nicholson or Robert DeNiro up there
emoting? Where they’ve really begun to make some changes
is in the way that all the niceties of character development
and carefully controlled exposition have been thrown out for
the sake of bringing on more and more spectacular effects.
I noticed this in Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
you never get to "know" any of the characters in
the manner of commercial films of the past. But where it really
shows most is in The Fury: nothing but action set
pieces, with little or no connection between one bit and the
next.
This could be the wave of the future. We’re talking
about something totally outside of aesthetics (though it does
have aesthetic consequences: DePalma may be Hollywood’s
answer to Michael Snow). It’s just that the smart money
is beginning to realize it doesn’t have to lie to itself
about story values in terms of reaching an audience. Just
give them one damn thing after another -- they won’t
be bored.
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© Copyright Raymond Durgnat Estate, David Ehrenstein
and Jonathan Rosenbaum 1978. No part of this article may be
reprinted without permission of the authors
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