26

Dramatic Voice/Narrative Voice

David Burdwell notes that maintstream film subordinates everything to narrative causality and character motivation. “In Hollywood cinema, a specific sort of narrative causality operates as the dominant, making temporal and spatial systems vehicles for it.”¹ These subordinated temporal and spatial systems—the actual elements of film language—are rendered transparent by the functioning of a conventional structure that creates the illusion that the story would happen exactly the same way regardless of whether the camera were there. Most of our dramatic concerns—the plausibility of motivation, the consistency of character, the avoidance of overt coincidence, the construction of a believable backstory—come out of the conceit that we are spying on a pre-existing event. As we discussed in Chapter 2, this conceit is deeply embedded in nineteenth-century notions of realism and naturalism, and, like the restorative three-act structure, can be traced back to the well-made play. ²

For our purposes, we identify a scene that seems to tell itself—one that plays without making us conscious that it is being narrated—as a scene that is dominated by the dramatic voice. But as we said earlier, even a scene using the dramatic voice must be given shape by some form of narrating agency that organizes the presentation of events. No matter how realistic the representation, we are not watching reality—the act of representing the world implies narration. The narrating may be overt or virtually invisible, but it is always present.

The use of the terms narrator and narrative voice in film is problematic. First, a narrator in film is most often understood as a voiceover narrator. Relatively few films use such voiceovers, and if our comments pertained only to them, we would be addressing a very narrow concern. Second, the narrative voice is problematic in film because it is deeply embedded in literature and refers to the manner in which the writer speaks directly to us. Such simple and direct authorial address is not possible in most films because there are too many intermediating agencies in the mass media production process to speak of a unified, singular filmmaker’s voice. Also, in most films, the articulation of the narrative voice is much less direct than it is in literature. ³

However, even given these reservations, we find that voice and narration are the only terms that speak to the independent filmmaker’s desire to be heard, to express a personal vision while still using the storytelling ability of narrative (as opposed to experimental) filmmaking. Thus, we use these terms to refer to the agency that communicates the story to us, whether overtly or not. In fact, the literary antecedents are useful to us because we can understand the development of narrative voice in mainstream film by looking at the movement from the classic nineteenth-century omniscient narration to the limited, three-person narrator of Henry James and Gustave Flaubert. The classic omniscient narrator of the nineteenth century was not only all knowing, but also all judgmental—not only able to spy on all aspects of this preexisting world, but also capable of commenting and evaluating. For instance, George Eliot opens Middlemarch with this sentence:

Not only does this sentence serve to introduce Theresa, it also introduces a style of narration in which the narrator is willing to admit to a clear sense of what is important. This is evident in its flat declaration that the character, Theresa, like the saint, is going out to seek martyrdom.

Today, we probably find such pre-judgment by the narrative voice old-fashioned, preferring instead to make our own judgment as the story plays out. In effect, we would rather infer the quality of the character by the dramatic voice, rather than be told by the narrator. Even if we wanted to, it would be very hard to communicate this omniscient judgment directly in film. How would we show Theresa as a saint? With the superimposition of a statue, church music, and animated halo? All of these expressionistic devices have been tried and, for the most part, were found to be heavy handed and literal. In the 1927 Soviet film Oktober, director Eisenstein’s mocking of the pompous revolutionary leader Kerensky, by superimposing his walk with the strut of a cock, has historical interest but does not suggest much of a practical alternative to us today. Does this mean, then, that a filmmaker cannot suggest a point of view without being so mannered? No. The late nineteenth-century development of the narrator within the story provides an analogy for the classic film style.

Reacting against the overt authorial presence of writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot, many novelists (foremost among them Gustave Flaubert and Henry James) looked for another way to narrate stories. They shifted their interest from the question of what we know to how we know it, and, as a result, they saw the omniscient, judging narrator as problematic, asking: Where does this voice of God come from? What explains the certainty with which an omniscient narrator creats and claims to know the fictive world? Though it was possible for a reader to judge the characters’ trustworthiness (based on their actions, about which an opinion could be formed), how could it be possible to engage the narrator who injected a point of view, but stood outside the story? Thus, instead of commenting directly on the action, Henry James came up with the notion of the reflector character, or the narrator within the story—a character who was presented quite neutrally by the writer, but who was allowed to recount and make judgments about the events in which she was involved. This character provides narrative in place of the writer, but since she exists in the fictive world of the story, it would be possible for the reader to engage with her even as she is presenting information.

We can see how this works when we contrast this sentence of Henry James’s The Ambassadors to the Middlemarch sentence quoted previously: “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.”⁵ Notice, immediately, how little direct authorial judgment this sentence makes (of course, there are implications of narrative voice in the syntax, word usage, length of the sentence, etc.). The emotion directly described is Strether’s, an emotion that we take to be one of which the character is fully conscious and thus is in a position to describe. By contrast, in Middlemarch, the judgments are authorial; nothing there allows us to assume that the young Theresa regards herself as a saint.

Strether’s not being “wholly disconcerted” is taken up over the next few pages of The Ambassadors, developed, as it were, through Strether’s consciousness, so that we learn, as he figures out the reason for being “not wholly disconcerted”:

Strether is, in effect, setting (narrating) his own situation—we enter the dominant voice of the book with his plotting his own expectations of how he wants to first meet Europe.⁷

The classic film style draws on this idea of allowing the character to, in effect, narrate his or her own story, without forcing the filmmaker to overtly comment. For instance, there is a scene in The Verdict in which Galvin enters the victim’s hospital room with the intention of taking Polaroids that he can use to get more money from the out-of-court settlement. As he takes the pictures, however, he moves slower and slower until he finally stops altogether, staring at one picture of the victim as it develops in front of his eyes. We know that this is the important moment of the scene, the moment where he begins to realize he must take the case to trial. But how do we know? Without in any way calling attention to them, the narrator employs a number of devices (rhythm, lighting, cutting pattern) that emphasize the importance of this decision, but because they all seem to be at the service of Galvin’s realization, we get the sense that Galvin is not only making a decision, but he, not the narrator, is also directing our attention to its importance.

Hiding the narrator agent behind the character also explains one of the paradoxes of the classic style—that, although the story appears to be driven by character, the camera expresses very little of the character’s emotion on its own. The lens is almost never distorted by subjectivity, and rarely do we see extreme angle interpretative shots. Rather, the narrative agency sets the stage for the character perspective by its use of point-of-view and eyeline-match sequences, structuring a series of neutral shots and reverse shots that are carefully tied to the line of the character’s emotion. Our movement through the film is made up of our progressive awareness of the character’s (as opposed to the filmmaker’s) attitude toward the action. It’s as though the filmmaker, much like Flaubert and James, is unwilling to say anything directly, preferring instead to let the characters tell their own story.

This method of storytelling, during which the narrator apparently cedes emotional control of the story to his character (remember, the outside narrator never disappears; he only appears to), raises a major obstacle for the independent narrative filmmaker. Independent films are made out of the desire of the filmmaker to speak in his own voice (whether this is possible is another topic). However, by emphasizing the dramatic voice over the narrative, by concealing the filmmaker’s voice behind the characters’, the effaced narrator of the classic film style restricts direct lyrical expression. The independent filmmaker who is seeking her own voice must find a way to assert the narrative voice over the dramatic pull of events. This may be harder in film (and video) than in all other arts because of the inherent naturalism and apparent transparency of the camera’s image.⁸

Voice and Structure

Clearly, much of what we are calling voice in film is under the control of the director. The relative realism of color scheme, the lighting contrast ratios, the set design, the casting, the balance of ambient sounds to dialogue, and the final editing pattern are beyond the realm of the writer. Still, it is possible to construct a script that emphasizes the narrative voice at the level of the story. As before, we have to start with structure.

We said that in classic film style, overt narration tends to be hidden behind a structure that functions to organize the meaning of events without calling attention to itself. If we want to place the narrative voice in the foreground, we must reduce the primacy of this unacknowledged structural drive.

However, if we reduce the dependence on the restorative three-act structure, we must find other ways to supply a narrative voice.

To simplify, we might say that structure is a pattern designed to focus the questions we want the viewer to ask as the story unfolds. Although structure is tied up with character-driven plot in classic Hollywood film, it does not necessarily have to be used that way. Structure is pattern. It may be made of anything that organizes our attention—a repeated line of dialogue, a recurrent situation, a musical theme, an external historical moment, a radio in the background, a return to the same location. The less structure relates to plot, the more formal it seems to be. The more external to the action, the more structure reads as the filmmaker’s voice.

The realistic use of patterns, which we identify as mainstream structure, functions in two distinct and apparently self-contradicting ways. Structure tells us what is necessary for the movie to come to an end, while at the same time it must not call attention to itself. We know, for instance, that in Wall Street, Bud must come to terms with his father before the movie can end, but when he does, we must feel that this is an inevitable outgrowth of character, not an overt manipulation by the filmmaker giving order to what would otherwise be an ambiguous circumstance.

To play against the structural dominance of mainstream film, then, we have to uncouple plot structure from simple story closure (or at least twist it) and find a way to call attention to its patterning. This sounds like it requires a radical approach to filmmaking, but this is not necessarily so, as evidenced in an apparently mainstream example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Scottie, a former police lawyer, falls in love with Madeleine, the woman he has been employed to protect. Obsessed by bizarre suicide fantasies, she apparently kills herself by jumping from a church bell tower. Overcome by guilt, Scottie breaks down and is unable to pull himself together until he sees a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, and Scottie seeks to remake her as Madeleine. We are told that this new woman, Judy, actually had originally disguised herself as the very Madeleine whom Scottie thought had fallen to her death, to cover a murder plot. Scottie doesn’t know this and proceeds to make Judy over to recreate an image of Madeleine. When Scottie finally realizes what has happened, he takes Judy back to the bell tower where, after having it out, she convinces him that she loves him. As they begin to kiss, a nun, having overheard them, suddenly appears and causes the startled Judy to fall to her death, mimicking the bell tower “suicide” earlier in the film.

The film is divided in half, which suggests a kind of oppositional binary structure (the action in the first half, the reconstruction of the action in the second) different from traditional three-act structure. Scottie’s recreation of Madeleine seems to succeed. The traditional pattern of transgression, recognition, and redemption has been overturned—Judy looks like she will get away with murder, and Scottie, with his obsessive remaking. Then the nun appears and Judy tumbles to her death. The nun’s appearance seems both realistic and self-consciously tacked on to the film. Although the death from the bell tower has certainly been set up, the dominant dramatic force throughout the second half of the film is the question of Scottie’s relationship to Judy. Their final embrace seems to resolve the dilemma, but this would be a disorienting resolution. If they make it together, how are we to take the murder and the illicit perversity of Scottie? Does crime actually pay? Yes and no; Judy’s death implies “no.” But suppose we don’t read the nun’s appearance with the same sense of realism as we did in the rest of the film? Suppose we have a sense that some agency outside of the fictive world told her to come in, as if Hitchcock quite boldly is saying, “It is time to end the film now and to restore order.” Then would the message of the film be that crime does not pay? Or would we be getting a much richer, more self-conscious and fascinatingly ambiguous message that seems to be primly acceptable, while at the same time winks at the simple morality of more traditional endings? Such a possibility takes us out of the realm of plausible storytelling and leaves us with a lingering, overt, and much more bitter perception of the decorative veneer of story closure and its attendant romance.

Psycho, too, provides an interesting example of what happens when the apparent structural pattern is turned around. Much has been written about how Janet Leigh’s murder gains particular power because it breaks the genre expectation that the main character will survive. But the murder does something else. By breaking the apparent dramatic drive of the story, it leaves us confused, uncertain what to look for or whom to follow. Left on our own, the dark tonalities of the film rise to the foreground and we feel a loss of direction that makes us even more anxious than the murders themselves would warrant.

Although he twists our expectations, Hitchcock still works within (and at times against) classic narrative cinema. A much more extreme example can be seen in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (Eclipse). This film, which charts a skittish love affair between Vittoria, a nervous woman played by Monica Vitti, and an unimaginative stockbroker, is more about urban space and how it distorts intimacy than it is about character and relationships. The lovers meet twice at the same intersection. Both times, nothing appears to happen between them; instead, the camera seems more interested in the surroundings—a race horse trotting by, the emptiness of the streets, the permanence of the physical location in contrast to the tentativeness of the characters. The camera, far from being neutral, regards the lovers with the same sense of formal distance with which it regards everything else; hence, the dominant emotional force comes from the camera, not from the characters. By the second visit, Vittoria senses that there is a relationship between this desolation and her own life. It’s almost as if she is becoming aware of the camera’s distance.

Toward the end of the film, the lovers agree to meet at the intersection for a third time. They never show up, but Antonioni does. In a famous 8-minute sequence, he films the intersection as it appears without the lovers. It slowly darkens and the streetlights come on (representing an actual eclipse or merely dusk, we never know). Over the sparse electronic music, the shots become increasingly abstracted and fragmentary until the sequence ends with an extreme close-up of a light bulb going on, which then dissolves into the grain of the film. The characters have disappeared; they are not important anymore. What had been a narrative film becomes an experimental one— the dramatic voice is completely taken over by the narrative. The only logic informing the shots is the filmmaker’s. There appears to be no fictive world, only a lyrical documentary of the street.

This ending is surprisingly powerful. Although the characters do not appear, somehow the filmmaking has taken on the characters’ feelings. Or, more accurately, the characters have taken on the feelings expressed all along by the filmmaking. The devolution of image in the last sequence seems to be a direct personal expression of the filmmaker’s sense of the ineffability of emotional experience against the mass meaninglessness of the landscape. The character and the narrator have merged.

Conclusion

We have used the distinction between dramatic and narrative voice to talk about the relative foregrounding of the organizing agency in the story. We note that all films use a combination of these two voices. Mainstream filmmaking tends to follow Henry James’s edict for literature— ”Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize”—and particularly emphasizes the effaced narrator and the character’s narration of his own story by using the point-of-view sequence and the eye match.

We suggest that the independent filmmaker who wants her voice to be heard tip the scales back toward emphasizing the narrative voice. This requires finding ways to uncouple traditional structure’s one-to-one linkage with plot. We have demonstrated that such uncoupling requires only the slightest shift in balance, as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or a great commitment to almost lyric experimentation, as in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse.

References

1.  David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 12.

2.  Of course, it can be traced back to Aristotle, but as Erich Auerbach points out in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (translated from the German by Willard Trask, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), the combining of “low mimetic forms” and tragic forms, which define what we call realism, comes after the French Revolution.

3.  In Narration in the Fiction Film by David Bordwell (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). David Bordwell has an interesting set of chapters that contrast the dramatic model of narration with the more narrative model. He concludes that neither model is theoretically satisfactory; a conclusion with which we agree, although we suspect there will never be a fully satisfactory way to talk about this from the writer’s perspective.

4.  George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 25.

5.  Henry James, The Ambassadors (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 5.

6.  Ibid., 5.

7.  We are simplifying very complex material in order to present it here. We don’t want to imply that the narrator outside the story has been replaced by Strether, only that another level of narration has been cloned (Strether’s), which allows the narrator outside the story (there must always be one) to be less evident. These assumptions of the objective, non-commenting narrator also came under attack in literature. A pivotal book, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) demonstrates just how involved the so-called invisible narrators actually are.

8.  Rudolf Arnheim made a more general instance of this argument in his book Film As Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), but he was dealing with experimental film and the whole question of modifying the image per se. We are dealing with a narrative situation rather than experimental film and will suggest that this may be done by story construction.