don larsson speculates interestingly about the ways in which film
"mis"represents, by reducing three dimensions to two, framing action rather
than letting it happen all around, using black and white rathr than color, etc.
. . . but these are, i think, the conventionally accepted characteristics of
the medium, characteristics that we agree as part of our contract with the
nedium to ignore or about which we suspnd disbelief, just as we ignore the fact
the the room on the theater stage has only three walls . . . this is quite a
different matter from that of unreliable narration in which one set of
linguistic terms, patently manifest, is held up to ironic undercutting by
another set of linguistic terms, which qualify as merely latent   . . .
 
. . . that a medium, ANY medium, is inevitably partial in the sense of
portraying only a part, and a distorted part, of the world is not only true but
necessary . . . without this selection and distortion there would be no text,
only the world itself [also no doybbt textualizable, but that's a different
problem] . . . the important distinction here is between distortions that are
part of the conventions on a mdeium, and distortions that those conventions
themselves identify as distortions . . . the way the very prose of the narrator
in, say, "turn of the screw" gives away a kind of unreliablility . . .
 
mike frank
 
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