Lang Thompson says:
>I've been wondering how many examples there can be of the film
>equivalent of the unreliable narrator. Such uncertainty is much >more rare
in film than literature.
Not so rare as you may think, the unreliable narrator in film is quite
prevalent. Just to cite briefly a few examples;
"Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" (La riviere du Hibou) Robert Enrico.
"Jacob's Ladder" Adrian Lynn, same idea as Owl Creek, i.e. the whole film
takes place inside the head of the protagonist within a fraction of a second.
Compare also "Total Recall" (starring Schwarzenegger) where the film is
imagined as he is sitting in a doctor's office wearing electrodes. Indeed the
unreliable narrator usually coincides with a subjective point of view.
Then there's the famous false flashback in Hitchcock's "Stagefright." In "Le
Recit Cinematographique" (1991 Nathan, Paris), Andre Gaudreault and Francois
Jost explain: "*showing* an event rather than *telling* it verbally are not
strictly equivalent narrative attitudes. This is the lesson in Alfred
Hitchcock's "Stage Fright": the hero describes by which unlucky chain of
events he is suspected of a crime he did not commit. His tale is transmitted
to us audiovisually (a flashback). At the end, surrounded by the police, he
admits to this person to whom he had tried to prove his innocence, that he is
in fact the true killer. It is clear that the formal difference between these
two narratives (shown and told) of the same story have consequences on the
viewer's beliefs: in the first version of the crime, visualized, it is
difficult to doubt what the hero shows us, simply because the image is
assertive. On the other hand, when we see him trembling, trapped under a
strong contrasting light, we seize his psychological state before his words,
such that we tend, along with his friend, to doubt the veracity of his speech
and to put it down to a mental disturbance."
There are different forms of this, in which the main character lies to
everyone including us, the viewers. In Fritz Lang's "The Unbelievable Truth",
a character decides as a dare to prove that the legal system is flawed. He
discovers an unsolved murder and sets out to plant clues that he is guilty.
He has his friend take pictures of him as he plants false clues around the
scene of the crime. These pictures become the proof of his innocence (the
film seems also to be about the statut of pictures, including movie frames,
as proof). Indeed there is a trial and of course his friend with the pictures
cannot be found. All seems lost. Finally the images show up and he is
acquitted, using the moment of glory to vocalize his gripes about the
American legal system. Later he confides to a friend that the whole plan was
a scheme to prove his innocence because he was in fact guilty all along.
(Though this friend then turns him in so justice prevails over all).
One can also cite examples such as the panel in "2001" that lights up
"Computer Malfunction", when HAL is supposedly infallible -- so why would
this panel exist? and other flaws. Equally improbable is Grady letting Jack
out of the storage locker in "The Shining". This is the one moment where the
spirit world must physically intervene in order for us to understand the
story; in other words, except for that moment, according to the impersonal
narrator you can take or leave Jack's insanity and visions -- until that
moment at which you must accept it.
>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.
Do you take into consideration "Un chien andalou" or "Meshes of the
Afternoon" in which terms like real and illusory lose their meaning?
-Pip Chodorov <[log in to unmask]>
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