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]