Narrative and the Film ImageAuthor(s): Alfred GuzzettiSource: New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter, 1975), pp.379-392Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468426Accessed: 14/12/2009 16:13

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Narrative and the Film Image

Alfred Guzzetti

AN THE IMAGE in a fiction film-the framing, composition and

sequence of shots, the movement of the camera, the place- ment of cuts, and all the rest-be explained by reference to

narrative alone? The most influential writers on film assume that it can. Andre Bazin, for example, in analyzing the structure of the image in a hypothetical film scene of the I93os, finds it sufficient to cite only two principles:

(I) the verisimilitude of the space, within which the position of the char- acter is always determined, even when a close-up eliminates the decor; (2) [the fact that] the intention and effects of the decoupage are exclusively dramatic or psychological.

In other words, played in a theater and seen from a seat in the orchestra, the scene would have exactly the same meaning, the event would continue to exist objectively. The changes in the camera's point of view add nothing. They only present reality in a more effective manner. First by permitting a better view, then by putting the accent where it belongs.1

Like most theorists and critics, Bazin shows no inclination to challenge the idea that narrative, with its "dramatic or psychological" require- ments, is the controlling factor in shooting and cutting and that the

image has only the very subordinate role of supplying "accent." In fact, except in the limited class of instances where "the verisimilitude of the space" is at stake, he proposes no terms at all with which to

explain the form of the image. Elsewhere, he makes this silence a critical principle, siding with directors "who believe in reality" as op- posed to those "who believe in the image."2 When he discusses a

specific shot, he does so only to the extent that the narrative informs

I Qu'est-ce que le Cinema? (Paris, 1958), I, I40. The translation is mine and corresponds to that in What is Cinema? tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles, I969), pp. 31-32. The term decoupage, which has no English equivalent, designates the division of the action into shots; it is to be distiguished from montage, which means editing. 2 Qu'est-ce que le Cinema? I, 132.

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

it, never as it reflects the whole array of decisions made by the cinema- tographer, editor, and director. The requirements of spatial verisimili- tude and narrative are, in his view, independent of these decisions to such an extent that he willingly associates different sets of decisions with "exactly the same meaning."

This conception of image and narrative, paradoxical and deficient as it seems, merely reflects that implied in the style of classical sound films.3 To understand the source and consequence of these deficiencies, one must examine the conventions of that style in some detail, spe- cifically those that link the "dramatic or psychological" to the spatial. For this purpose, it is useful to refer to the practical manuals of cinema- tography and editing where these conventions are formulated as rules. The fact that they appear in this guise rather than as theoretical or critical propositions is significant in itself, since it reflects the consensus of critics and viewers that "film" is so completely identified with classical narrative that the workings of this style are not convention, but "technique." Yet inasmuch as these rules are compatible only with certain views of image and narrative, they undeniably constitute a critical and theoretical position.

Two sets of rules, those governing continuity and screen direction, are of particular relevance to the relation of narrative to image.4 The first concerns the problem of showing an ongoing action in successive shots. The basic rule of this set requires the editor to join the shots so that the action is picked up at the beginning of the second at the precise point it reaches by the end of the first. In shots that show human beings, as in many that do not, the action normally includes segments of continuous movement as well as resting points, called "nodes." A second, and much looser, rule favors placing the cut on the node. The consequence of both rules is to permit the logic of the action to dominate that of the cutting. Cuts so made tend to be "invisible": that is, they do not signify that two pieces of film have been joined together, as they would if a segment of the action were repeated or omitted or if the cut interrupted movement or stasis.

The continuity rules specify further that at the point of the cut there must be a substantial change of scale or angle or both. Thus, if

3 I use the term classical more broadly than Bazin, who restricts it to the common practices of decoupage among films of the 19305. 4 My account of these rules follows that in Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 2nd ed. (New York, i969), pp. 213-26, cited here- after as "Reisz." The same rules may be found in Terrence St. John Marner, Directing Motion Pictures (London and New York, I972), Arthur L. Gaskill and David A. Englander, How to Shoot a Movie Story (New York, I967), and Kenneth H. Roberts and Win Sharples, Jr., A Primer of Film-making (New York, I971).

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the editor begins with a medium shot showing the actor from head to

mid-thigh, the rule allows a cut to a close-up of the face of the same

person seen from the same angle, but not, say, to a shot that shows him, again from the same angle, from head to waist. The rationale

given is that the prohibited cut produces a change of scale slight enough to seem jumpy and awkward.

But a more consequential explanation is possible. In the essay "Dickens, Griffith, and Us," Eisenstein observes that the difference in the American and Russian conceptions of the close-up is reflected in the two respective languages.5 The Russian term literally means a "large shot," as does the French "gros plan." Thus in Russian and French, the shot is defined by its graphic aspect, the scale of the image on the surface of the screen, whereas in English, it is defined by the

proximity of the camera to the subject. This observation suggests a

potential ambiguity in the instance I have given of the rule of scale- change: for any cut that takes the camera closer to the subject is

capable of signifying both "enlargement" and "approach." The small change of scale prohibited by the rule would link two shots whose overall graphic patterns within the rectangle are inevitably very similar, thus calling attention to the surface of the screen and to the associated signification "enlargement." By contrast, the close-up permitted by the rule changes the graphic pattern sufficiently that attention to the screen surface goes unrewarded, allowing the cut to be understood unambiguously as a movement of viewpoint situated within the space in which the action is played. Small changes of angle are excluded on the same principle.

In addition, angle changes are subject to the rules governing screen direction. A shot in which Actor A is shown screen-left and Actor B screen-right must not be immediately followed by a shot in which their screen positions are reversed. This condition will be met if both shots are taken from the same side of an imaginary line, sometimes called the director's line or center line, established between the two actors on the floor of the shooting location. The simplest instance is a dialogue scene in which A and B sit at opposite ends of a table: shots taken from any angle within the I8o0 in front of the table may be cut together; shots taken from behind the table can be cut in continuity with these only if the camera or actors move, thus establishing a new center line, or if a spatially "neutral" shot such as a close-up, insert, or high-angle, is intercut. Similarly, a shot of an actor walking screen-

5 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (London, 1963), pp. 237-38. The essay in question is included under the title "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today."

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left to screen-right cannot be cut to a shot of him walking right to left without signifying that his path has changed direction. Shots of A

walking left to right intercut with B walking right to left imply that A and B will meet in a subsequent shot. Shots of A running right to left intercut with B running in the same screen direction signify pursuit.

The meaning of these configurations depends on the hypothesis that a direction on the screen signifies a direction in three-dimensional

space and that the shots are segments of a spatial whole. The perspec- tive cues in the image are evidently sufficient to place the screen direc- tion within the dimensions of the pictured space only if the fundamental directional hypothesis remains uncontradicted. A permitted angle- change in the dialogue scene may differ from anything we perceive in

reality, yet it shows enough about the placement of the two figures for the spectator to understand how the two viewpoints are situated in space. By contrast, the prohibited angle-changes draw an equivalence between one spatial direction and two opposed screen directions. The result is disorienting because it cannot be immediately interpreted in terms of the pictured space but momentarily only in the dimensional dichotomy of the image plane.

Clearly, the aim of both sets of rules is to allow the information in the flat image to be translated without ambiguity into the three- dimensional space of the action: in Bazin's words, to produce "the verisimilitude of the space, within which the position of the character is always determined." The contemporary theorist Christian Metz describes the resulting effect this way: "In a scene of everyday con- versation, [the spectator] will more or less have the impression of hav- ing seen at every moment the whole of the room. Perception recon- structs a unitary space-time through a spontaneous (but coded) totali- zation of partial views and through the play of immediate memory."6 This process of spatial integration, consciously experienced by most spectators only as the difficulty of recalling the decoupage of a scene, is obstructed by styles that violate the continuity or directionality rules or, like Eisenstein's, rely heavily on the close-up. Classical style, as Bazin notes, can tolerate the spatial ambiguity of an occasional close- up, although to "believe in reality" fully means, as in Rossellini's films, to avoid the close-up altogether.

But since the rules of continuity and direction have more to say about what is not to be done in shooting and editing than what is, alone they do not constitute a sufficient basis for explaining the image. A more positive factor, which Bazin calls "dramatic or psychological," is

6 Christian Metz, "Ponctuations et demarcati. ns dans le film de diegese," Cahiers du Cinema, Nos. 234-35 (Dec. 1971, Jan.-Feb. !972), p. 69.

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described by his British contemporary Ernest Lindgren as follows: "The fundamental psychological justification of editing as a method of representing the physical world around us lies in the fact that it

reproduces this mental process in which one visual image follows another as our attention is drawn to this point and to that in our

surroundings."7 Reisz points out that though this rationale may be extended to cover changes in scale, which simulate changes in attention, it does not adequately explain changes of angle, which correspond to no simple fact of individual perception. Reisz's explicit answer is to ascribe these changes to "the right of selection which we accept from an artist," who gives us a dramatic, and therefore "ideal," view.8

But in passages like the following, he implies a more concrete

explanation:

A man is sitting at a table on which stands a glass of wine. He leans forward, picks up the glass with his right hand, brings it to his lips and drinks.... Just before the actor starts his forward movement, his facial expression-a glance downward, possibly-will register his intention. If the cut is made precisely at this point-i.e., just before the hand begins to move-it will be smooth, because it will coincide with the mnoment of change from rest to activity. (Reisz, pp. 217-18)

The "psychological" principle interwoven with the rule favoring cutting on the node is more complex than it may first appear. The cut, like the glance, registers intention; it externalizes something that happens in the character's mind. Yet, oddly, the scale of the image changes not for the character but for us, the spectators. As the actor looks down- ward, our tendency to identify with his gaze redefines the field of our attention to conform with his. The image enacts this change by switch-

ing not to a downward view of the wineglass but to a still frontal but

tighter shot which locates the glass at the bottom of the frame.

What this example suggests is that, contrary to the explicit views of Reisz, Lindgren, and Bazin, classical cutting does not mimic the atten- tion of an observer to an action so much as it represents attention mediated through the actor. Only infrequently does this mediation take the form of an actual coincidence of a character's spatial view-

point with the camera's. Even when the image shows a character, as it must, from a spatial viewpoint which could not be his own, it

encourages us to identify with him, at least to the extent of imagining ourselves in his position within the pictured space. This identification

7 Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (London, 1949), p. 55. 8 Reisz, pp. 215-16.

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is rewarded not only in reverse-angle cuts, but, as Reisz's example demonstrates, also in subsequent shots that continue to show him, as it were, "objectively." The common shot-reverse-shot pattern of dia- logue scenes, which Reisz finds difficult to justify theoretically, may be referred to this principle. The shot of Actor A taken from over Actor B's shoulder, usually explained as a rendition of B's "point of view"- although the camera never precisely occupies B's position (A never looks directly into the lens) and although frequently a portion of B's head or body is visible-also causes the spectator to identify himself with A. If it did not, the cut to the "reverse" angle, showing B from over A's shoulder, would be unintelligible.

A relation may be drawn between this psychological principle and the aim of spatial verisimilitude. The continuity and directionality rules support what Joel Haycock calls "the analogous traits" of the image, the contention that the pictured space is analogous to that in which the spectator is situated.9 In this sense, they are preconditions to the further analogy between the spectator and the figure or figures shown. The resulting identification, supported by the decoupage, allows the spectator to understand the space as the characters do. Thus a shot of an actor looking offscreen-right is made to imply that the following shot will represent a segment of the space located in that direction. As Haycock argues, this structure promises that we, like the characters, may look into, and in this way place ourselves within, the continuous space extending beyond the boundaries of the frame.

The narrative illusion so constituted, the notion that the spectator is witness to a complete world informed by the alternating subjectivities of the characters and is able to identify himself with them, thus rests on the spatial organization of the image. It is clear, given this depend- ency, that the continuity and directionality rules function as much to discredit the image as a two-dimensional surface as to affirm its three- dimensional reference: that is, they imply that a full acknowledge- ment of the complexity of the image is incompatible with the narrative. The relation of the two, therefore, may be more accurately described as opposition than subordination-a fact which at once defines "clas- sicism" in narrative film and demonstrates the futility of attempting to explain the image adequately within the terms of classical styles.

However, there exists a second category of narrative conventions, which may be called "modernist," to which these conclusions do not apply. The term "modernist" in this definition requires no demonstrable

9 Joel Haycock, "Radical Ideology in the Cinema: An Essay on Jean-Luc Godard," Diss. Harvard 197I, pp. 52ff. My argument also owes a more general debt to the position taken in this essay.

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link to historical movements of the same name in painting, music, or fiction, but simply designates film styles which encourage reflection on their constituent means of expression, specifically their sounds and

images. It is thus opposed to classicism, which organizes the image so as to obstruct reflection of this kind.

By definition, then, modernism resists the sort of practical or theo- retical codification possible (perhaps even necessary) in the case of its opposite. There has been no major spokesman for modernism in film since Eisenstein and, of course, no rule book of modernist style. Further discussion of image and narrative must, therefore, be con- ducted within the terms provided by an instance of modernist style. Since modernism embraces a spectrum of styles, the film I propose to cite-Godard's Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d'elle, made in 1966- has no more valid claim to be regarded as typical than, say, Zero de Conduite or Muriel. Yet while in those films the conception of image and narrative remains implicit, in Godard's it is conveniently made the

subject of speculation delivered on the sound track in the voice and

persona of the director. The little narrative that there is in Deux ou Trois Choses que je

sais d'elle is organized around the movements of Juliette Janson, a middle-class married woman and part-time call girl, during a twenty- four hour period. The "elle" of the title refers to her and, as the main credits explain, to "the Paris region" where she lives and works. The scene in which the voice-over commentary touches on issues closest to the present discussion occurs almost midway through the action; Godard, speaking in the whisper he uses throughout, introduces it with a pair of questions on the problem of rendering narrative as image: "How to give an account of events? How to show or say that on this

afternoon, at about 4: Io, Juliette and Marianne came to a garage at the Porte des Ternes where Juliette's husband works?"10 Though it is tempting to take these questions solely as theoretical speculation on narrative, it is important first to specify the ways in which they are bound to their particular dramatic context. For as Godard asks how he may account for events, the accompanying sounds and images, as much "his" as the voice, set to work making just such an account. He

speaks as if the "events" he mentions, like the Paris region, existed

independently of his film-as if Juliette and her friend Marianne, as

o My translation of Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d'elle (Paris, I971), p. 64. Godard's word for events, evenements, is the same that Bazin uses in the text cited in n. I: "jouee sur un theatre . . l'evnement continuerait d'exister objectivement." The phrase "show or say" suggests the equal weight given to image and sound in modernist films, and to language in Godard's.

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NARRATIVE AND THE FILM IMAGE

a matter of historical fact, which it is his task merely to record, "came to the garage." We of course understand this pretense as a convention of fictional narrative. A pair of shots in the opening sequence of the film assures us that this understanding is relevant here: in the first, Godard shows the heroine, identifying her as Marina Vlady, the actress, and describing her hair, clothing, and Russian origin, while in the next, an almost identical view of the same woman, he tells us we are seeing Juliette Janson, whose hair, clothing, and national origin he describes in precisely the same terms.

These contradictions plainly establish that the whispered commen- tary is not to be understood as that of the historical Jean-Luc Godard, whose statements can have the status of theoretical assertions, but of the persona of director, whose speculations exist within a drama that includes him and his efforts at composition: "Yes .... How to say exactly what happened? Of course there is Juliette . . . there is her husband . . . there is the garage. But are these really the words and images one must use? These alone? Aren't there others? Am I speak- ing too loud? Am I watching from too far or too close?" (Deux ou Trois Choses, p. 65). The shot accompanying this text (shown in Illustration I) suggests no narrative criterion by which these questions may be definitively answered. Too far for what? The conversation between Juliette and her husband, which we see but do not hear, could be shown with equal clarity in a tighter framing, though this would have the effect of isolating it further from the background. The relation of the background action-the attendant filling the tank, the waiting cars-to the protagonists suggests other such relations possibly visible in a wider shot. But since none of these functions in the narra- tive, the narrative gives no means of settling the question. It is true that Godard prejudices matters by not allowing us to hear what is said. Nonetheless, we recognize that his text validly points to the problemati- cal and uncertain nature, admissible only in a modernist style, of the relation of narrative to at least one aspect of the image-namely, scale.

Yet despite the uncertainty indicated by Godard's questions, the accompanying shot is not, and probably cannot be, in any sense "un- certain" or "undetermined." This fact is explained in some degree by the text. In asking whether he is too far or too close, Godard in- directly calls attention to the particular distance he has chosen and thereby invites us to understand this choice as his responsibility. The "modernism" of this stylistic gesture in fact may be said to consist in the attribution of the choice to the director rather than to the internal logic of the narrative. Though other modernist films may not follow the strategy of explicitly dramatizing the agency of the director, their

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

narratives often in some way concern the act of making images: Blow- up, 8 2, Muriel, The Decameron, and Le Petit Soldat are obvious

examples. The shot I have been discussing begins with some action not evident

in the illustration. An attendant opens and closes the car door on Juliette's side, apparently to ask her what she wants, then crosses behind the vehicle to fill the tank; Juliette's husband enters and squats in the position shown. The chosen framing is thus in part justified by the action, since it allows us to see that the transaction between Juliette and the attendant continues while she speaks with her hus- band. However, this logic serves only to raise a further question, since the attendant is an anonymous figure in the drama, an extra, and this piece of action has no narrative consequences.

This issue, unresolved here, is taken up four shots later by means of the nearly static image (shown in Illustration 2) in combination with the following text: "There is also another young woman, of whom we know nothing. We wouldn't even know how to say that honestly" (Deux ou Trois Choses, p. 65). Though the young woman is placed in the frame in a way ordinarily reserved for the main characters of the drama, she indeed does not appear elsewhere in the film. The text stresses that it is not the director, the first person singular, who knows nothing about her, but "we," the spectators. His pretended inability to say this "honestly" jokes about the fact, unreported in the film, that the young woman is the second assistant director, Isabel Pons. But the text is more than just a joke. We do indeed know the sort of thing about her that Godard in the opening sequence tells us about Juliette: namely, the color of her hair and sweater, the expression on her face, the movements of her head. The sort of thing we do not know is what the narrative might tell us. If we were in a position to get Godard's joke, we would understand that he knows something about her that he can easily express neither in the image nor in the narrative. His text and image stress instead that we are not in this position. Not only are we ignorant of the specifics narrative might report, but narrative does not even give us terms for stating this ignorance "honestly": that is, for recognizing the sort of "knowledge" it promotes and suppresses. Including himself among the spectators, the "we" of the text, Godard in this rather opaque fashion suggests that narrative itself, quite apart from the particularities of its execution, has a "problematic," a struc- ture which encourages us to think only of certain things as in need, or capable, of explanation.

The following shot (Illustration 3) and its commentary make a parallel argument about the image: "There is also a cloudy sky, on the

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NARRATIVE AND THE FILM IMAGE

condition that I turn my head instead of looking steadily in front of me without moving. And inscriptions on the walls" (Deux ou Trois Choses, p. 66). In order to understand the phrase "on the condition that I turn my head," we must envisage the speaker present within the real space of the filming. Our impulse to identify with him, to sup- pose that we too will see a cloudy portion of the sky if we turn our heads, is obstructed by our situation as spectators. The sky that we do see is not cloudy, but hazy blue. Godard does not qualify this point, as he might have, by inserting a shot showing the cloudy sky. Instead, he stresses the strangeness of having to look fixedly ahead and of having one's view limited by the edges of the frame. In this way, he char- acterizes the image not as a segment integrable within a continuous

space, but an excision, differing in this respect from the view of a live witness. The combination of text and image suggests a critique not only of the rhetorical figure of Godard's phrasing, which identifies the

image with the director's gaze ("Do I watch from too close?" rather than "Have I placed the camera too close?") but of the functional

identity, posited by classical styles, of image and glance. A few slight movements in the shot allow us to relate this argument

to the psychological principle of narrative. After the phrase "I turn

my head," the station attendant, having finished lighting his cigarette, turns his head to look toward the camera; after the phrase "without

moving," he turns his head screen-right. The relation of the first of these gestures to what is said on the sound track invites a parallel be- tween the attendant and the director, for what the attendant does the director proposes to us he may do also. Our covert knowledge of film production, the understanding that the "voice-over," as the phrase implies, is an element added after the filming, enters into the interpreta- tion, ensuring that we do not take the actor's movements as a response to the director's words. Because the conditions of our vision as spec- tators differ as they do from the director's, the parallel between director and character enforces the recognition of how our situation also dif- fers from the character's. Here, too, Godard withholds any structural gesture, such as a shot representing the attendant's point of view, that might challenge this recognition. Instead, he insists that to be before an image is to be deprived of the freedom to move one's gaze in the way one does in space and to recognize one's dissimilarity to the figures shown.

The spatial premises of this style thus drastically limit the possibility of identifying with the characters of the drama. But at the same time, they open the possibility of incorporating into the meaning of the dis- course significant organizations of the image plane. For example, the

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shot shown in Illustration 2 can, and must, be taken to mean that the young woman is to be understood in relation to the objects-in par- ticular, the advertisements-grouped around her in the frame. Since we have no means of knowing exactly the size of the signs on the wall, and since we do not see the plane of the ground linking figure and wall, we have no certain sense of the space between them. Godard thus strengthens the flattening tendency of the image by composing the elements chiefly in reference to a single plane, an effect that is even more striking in the color original, where the yellow and blue

signs are set against a white wall. It is clear even without taking the analysis further that in this style

the classical chain of logic linking image to narrative is at its every point opposed and questioned. If the dichotomy "classicism versus modern- ism" is understood (to use the language of structuralism) "diachroni- cally," then it is sufficient merely to record these oppositions as dif- ferences. Some distinguished recent theorists, despite the synchronic nature of their method, take this view. The philosopher F. E. Spar- shott argues that critical differences about film cannot be resolved by discussion of the properties of the image, which is sufficiently com- plex to support differing, even opposing, views. Christian Metz por- trays film language as a heterogenous ensemble of elements, none of which occupies a controlling place or authorizes a critical principle.11

In reply, I should point out that since modernist styles take account of more aspects of the image, they are in a position to relate it to nar- rative in a more complex and more complete way. This is true not only in cases like that of Deux ou Trois Choses, where the interrogation of classical conventions is carried to exhaustion, but even of such films as The Gospel According to Matthew, whose modernism consists chiefly in certain discordantly documentary habits of cinematography, which function, as their author observes, only "to make the presence of the camera felt." 12

Completeness of this sort is not, however, a criterion that may be

simply applied in the judgment of films. It does not, for example, imply that because Pasolini's style habitually calls attention to the presence of the camera, his films are to be preferred to those that do not. Rather,

I Metz develops this view most fully in Language et Cinema (Paris, 197 ). Sparshott's essay, "Basic Film Aesthetics," is reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York, London, Toronto, 1974), pp. 209-32. I 2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Le cinema de poksie," Cahiers du Cinema, No. 171 (Oct. 1965), p. 64. Pasolini uses the phrase in a general discussion without specific reference to The Gospel According to Matthew, though this film clearly belongs to "the cinema of poetry."

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it suggests that the modernist model of image and narrative has a more valid claim to set the terms for interpretation and criticism. This means, at a minimum, accepting the premise that narrative and image in film, like text and music in opera, are distinct strands, one of which is not fully reducible to the other, and that critical positions, which, like Bazin's, reject this premise are compromised at the root.

To apply this principle in the interpretation and criticism of classical films is, obviously, to resist not only the manifest intentions of their au- thors but the assent given those intentions by spectators. The very intelligibility of classical styles demonstrates that these intentions are viable, that one may "succeed" in using narrative to suppress certain attributes of the image. What, then, justifies this resistance? As the

sequence from Deux ou Trois Choses demonstrates, a given characteri- zation of the image, two or three dimensional, bounded or "analogous," is neither a question of personal predilection, as Sparshott supposes, nor an isolated choice, but rather entails a whole ensemble of proposi- tions, not the least of which involve the relation of the spectator to the image. Thus one cannot argue that the image can be determined exclusively by style, if style is defined in isolation from the conditions that circumscribe the relation of spectator to screen. Modernist styles show that what is truly at issue in style extends beyond such exclusively formal questions as whether the image is taken to be surface or spatial reference to whether it is characterized as a material component in the work of author and spectator. The rules of continuity and direc- tionality suggest the extent to which classical styles are predicated on denying this. The critic who acquiesces in this denial foregoes the recognition not only that we, spectators and directors alike, live in a material world, to which the cinema belongs, but that the conditions of that world-in particular, the physical situation of the spectator and the material attributes of the image as they originate in optical and chemical processes and in human choice and labor-are pertinent to viewing or making films.

Such a recognition requires neither hostility to the classical film nor prejudice to critical questions that might be asked of it. Rather, it simply proposes that as a first principle criticism treat the organization of the image plane as significant, even when the style insists that it is not, and understand that such significance originates not in style alone but in the relation of the film image both to the space to which it refers and to the conditions that bound its presentation to the spectator. In taking account of these relations, interpretation, along with the criticism based on it, necessarily outruns the terms of narrative. Even when such criticism is in accord with the intentions of the director as

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they are recorded in the style, it is justified not by them but by the

aspiration to understand and respond to narrative film in its complete manifestation as a significant object.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY