Reply to:   ...unreliable narrator
 
Lang Thompson asked:
I've been wondering how many examples there can be of the film equivalent of
the unreliable narrator.  (snip)  I'm not thinking just of voice-over
narration but something a bit more encompassing where scenes that are
presented as "real" turn out to be either imaginary or misinterpreted.  In
literature, this device is fairly common; the most notorious instance may be
Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but also The Blithedale Romance
and Browning's Sordello are standard examples.  (Maybe you could include
narrators unreliable because of their limited information; Henry James
specialized in these such as Turn of the Screw, Figure in the Carpet or Daisy
Miller.) The catch of course is that a film story isn't tied so closely to
one consciousness:  there's a separation between a narrator/protagonist and
the material itself.  On the other hand, there are numerous instances of
filmic hallucinations, dream sequences or films/plays within the film.  But
these are either obviously not real or soon revealed as fake.  What i'd like
to find are films where entire scenes seem to be real within the story though
later they turn out to have been impossible or illusory.
 
 
John Geilgud played an unreliable narrator in "Providence".
Salieri certainly cannot be trusted to retell the story in "Amadeus".
I also found some aspects of what you describe in "The Princess Bride"
although it's more explicit in the book.
For me the best example of what you ask about is from "American Gigolo" where
the filmmaker never reveals what is really going on to the characters in the
film and the audience only gets visual cues to the "real" story if they pay
close attention.
Then there are films like "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoise" and even the
closing 'scenes' of "2001: A Space Odyssey" off the top of my head.
 
I think the form is alive and well in Film.
[log in to unmask]
 
----
To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L
in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]