I've been wondering how many examples there can be of the film equivalent of the unreliable narrator. (This was prompted by a recent movie that i won't name so that its surprises won't be spoiled.) 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. In the recent movie that i haven't named, there's a consistent story constructed by the end of the movie, all of which the viewer has seen. But there's also a revelation at the end which shows that some of the scenes the viewer has seen never actually happened at all, though until that revelation you had no reason to doubt them. Other scenes might not have occurred, at least in the way they were shown. Rashomon is an obvious comparison but that film is fairly simplistic in its choices and presentation. Any way, my point to a rambling post is that such uncertainty is much more rare in film than literature. Lang Thompson ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]