Narration and focalization

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Narration and focalization
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Source Jahn, Narratology
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Narration

• Narration is the telling of the story
• The narrator tells the story
• However, in electronic media the concept of
  narration is more problematic than in literature
• There may be no single narrator
• Filmic Composition Device
• Some say there is no narrator at all
• Others say that the auteur is the narrator
  (usually the director)

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Narration in film
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Narration

• Narration can come from within the fictional
  world (homodiegetic) or outside the fictional
  world (heterodiegetic)
• Narration can be very obvious (overt) or may be
  hard to detect (covert)
• The narrator may take the viewpoint of a
  character, may present the views of several
  characters or may approach the story from a
  godlike view (omniscience)

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Homodiegetic narrative

• The homodiegetic narrative is delivered by a
  story charactersomeone actively involved in the
  narrative. Usually, he then uses the
  first-person pronoun in his address (but not
  always). He may be the protagonist or just a bit
  player, but he is somehow affecting or affected
  by the actions going on in the story.
• First-person shooters take this visual
  perspective

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Homodiegetic narrator

• The author/auteur must decide which character
  will narrate.
• The perspective of the narrator strongly
  influences what the audience member will see,
  hear and know about the plot, other characters,
  etc.
• If a minor character is chosen, the information
  available to the audience may be quite limited.

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Displacement of time

• Homodiegetic narrators often tell a story about
  things that they experienced some time in the
  past
• A common form of such narration gives an account
  of the narrators earlier life
• The Wonder Years
• Stand By Me
• Titanic

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Limitations of homodiegetic narration

• she is subject to 'ordinary human limitations' .
  . . she is restricted to a personal and
  subjective point of view she has no direct
  access to (or authority on) events she did not
  witness in person she can't be in two places at
  the same time . . . and she has no way of knowing
  for certain what went on in the minds of other
  characters.
• Jahn, Narratology

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Unreliable narrators

• Narrators you cannot trust to provide a full and
  accurate account are called unreliable
  narrators
• A common feature of first-person narration is
  that you cant trust the narrator
• Dishonest
• Unstable
• Forgetful
• Mistaken
• Biased

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Heterodiegetic narration

• Heterodiegetic narration comes from a narrator
  who is not a character in the story.
• Heterodiegetic narrators vary widely in their
  knowledge and perspective. They may be
  restricted to the perspective of a single
  person or may have omniscienceboundless
  ability to know all there is to know about the
  plot, characters, setting, etc. in a story.

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Heterodiegetic narrative

• a homodiegetic narrator always tells a story of
  personal experience, whereas a heterodiegetic
  narrator tells a story about other people's
  experiences. (Jahn)

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Overtness

• How obvious (or overt) is the narration? An
  overt narrator is out in the opena focus of the
  audience members attention. A hidden narrator is
  covert.
• An overt narrator makes the telling or
  construction of the story an important focus for
  the audience

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Textual elements that project narrative voice
(Jahn)

• Content matter -- there are naturally and
  culturally appropriate voices for sad and happy,
  comic and tragic subjects (though precise type of
  intonation never follows automatically).
• Subjective expressions -- expressions (or
  'expressivity markers') that indicate the
  narrator's education, his/her beliefs,
  convictions, interests, values, political and
  ideological orientation, attitude towards people,
  events, and things.

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• Pragmatic signals -- expressions that signal the
  narrator's awareness of an audience and the
  degree of his/her orientation towards it.

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Indicators of film narration

• In film, television, videogames, etc. five main
  indicators of narration are present
• Voice over (VO) narrationan off-camera voice
  speaks to the audience member
• Much more rarely, an onscreen narrator is present
• The point of view of the camera
• Intrusive visual effects
• Onscreen writing
• Much of the craft of traditional Hollywood style
  is in making the narration covert.

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• Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an
  objective and a subjective camera, like there's a
  third- and a first-person narrator in literature.
  Manuel Puig

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How does the narrator address the audience?

• The narrator can take the first-person or
  third-person position vis-à-vis the implied
  audience member.
• Second-person is particularly difficult, but
  could theoretically be taken
• An offscreen voice telling an amnesiac what he
  did as the camera demonstrates it

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Paralepsis (Jahn)

• An infraction caused by saying too much a
  narrator assuming a competence she does not
  properly have typically, a first-person narrator
  (or a historiographer) narrating what somebody
  else thought . . . or what happened when she was
  not present.

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Paralipsis (Jahn)

• An infraction caused by omitting crucial
  information saying too little typically, an
  authorial narrator pretending "not to know" what
  happened in her/his characters' minds, or what
  went on at the same time in another place, or
  distortively censoring a character's thought, or
  generally pretending to be restricted to ordinary
  human limitations.

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• Paralepsis and paralipsis are instances of
  violations of Grice's (1975) famous principle of
  co-operation -- the notion that speakers
  (narrators) are socially obliged to follow an
  established set of 'maxims' to give the right
  amount of information, to speak the truth, to
  speak to a purpose (tell something worth
  telling), to be relevant, etc.

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Focalization

• Focalization refers to the viewpoint from which
  the story is told
• Usually the viewpoint of the narrator
• omniscient
• However, the viewpoint can be split from the
  narration
• The narrator (or FCD) can focus on the story
  based on a characters perspective

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The omniscient narrator

• The most common view taken in Western narratives
  (fiction or non-fiction) is a covert omniscient
  view. That is, the persons telling the tales are
  not obvious, are not characters in the story, and
  adopt an omniscient or godlike point of view
• Audience members are privy to information about
  the plot (what events have occurred and what
  their relationships are), the characters (and
  what they are thinking), the setting, and the
  backstory.
• The reader/audience member has information
  unavailable to any of the characters.

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Advantages of omniscience

• The viewer/reader can know things that are
  unknown to the characters
• The position allows for evaluation of characters
  and their actions
• The story can be more expansiveit can include
  a much wider set of characters, motives, actions
• In some cases, the distance between the audience
  member and the characters is a good thing

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Internal focalization

• The technique of presenting something from the
  point of view of a story-internal character is
  called internal focalization. The character
  through whose eyes the action is presented is
  called an internal focalizer
• Jahn, Narratology

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Internal Focalization

• Though not actually a character in the story, the
  narrator takes on the perspective of a story
  character and relates the story from that
  persons perspective.
• The narrator gets inside the head of that
  character, often relating their fears, beliefs,
  etc. to the implied audience member.

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Internal focalization

• One of the main effects of internal focalization
  is to attract attention to the mind of the
  reflector-character and away from the narrator
  and the process of narratorial mediation. (Jahn)

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Representing focalization

• Focalization can be represented by
  over-the-shoulder camera shots, shot-reverse shot
  representations of interactions among characters,
  focus on a character looking into the distance
  then turning to adopt the sightline of the
  looker, etc.
• Internal thoughts represented by VO

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Camerawork (Jahn)

• gaze shot
• A picture of a character looking ('gazing') at
  something not currently shown. A gaze shot is
  usually followed by a POV shot (or sometimes it
  is preceded by a POV shot).
• point of view shot, POV shot
• The camera assumes the position of a character
  and shows the object of his or her gaze.

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• over-the-shoulder shot
• The camera gets close to, but not fully into, the
  viewing position of a character . . .
• reaction shot
• A shot showing a character reacting (with wonder,
  amusement, annoyance, horror, etc.) to what s/he
  has just seen.

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Shifting narration and focalization

• Narration can shift within a given textperhaps
  between omniscient and first-person or from one
  character to another.
• Focalization shifts very commonly in electronic
  media texts
• Shifting narrative position is very common in
  electronic media.