Nice to see such a response.  I'd forgotten most of Stage Fright so

i'll be sure to watch it again.  And Total Recall does have other

examples (Philip Dick's novels are about almost nothing but the

unreliability of narrators).  Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge also even

though it does have a few tip-offs that it's not real (such as gates

swinging open with no visible source).  I also remember an episode of

Star Trek: The Next Generation where nearly the entire first half took

place on the holodeck without the people involved realizing it.  And i

guess for novelty value you might add the notorious dreamed season of

Dallas or the finale of the Bob Newhart show where he'd dreamed the

entire series but those really aren't good examples.

 

Maybe Bunuel might be the most common source of such unreliable events

in movies.  Some people have suggested that parts of Belle de Jour are

also fantasies but they can't pinpoint exactly which parts.  And the

Unnamed Recent Movie has events along a continuum from certain to

impossible and half the fun is trying to sort out which is what.

That's pretty much what i'm getting at, not hallucinations or

imaginings or whatever that are clearly unreal (or soon revealed as

such) but situations where there's no reason to doubt the reality as

part of the story until some later event.  What's interesting is that

when something is *seen* in a movie, it's assumed to be real unless

marked otherwise (dreams, hallucinations, etc).  I'm not sure this can

be considered a convention of filmic storytelling so much as an aspect

of the medium so strong that it's rarely questioned.  Even if we could

come up with two or three dozen examples, i'd still stand by my claim

that the unreliable narrator concept is quite rare in film in contrast

to literature and not just because actual narrators are uncommon in

film.

 

Lang Thompson

 

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