the following passage, which i just stumbled upon, from a recent note from peter latham, leads me to ask once again a question i raised a while back to little avail > speaking of unreliable narration in film peter says: > > Unreliability is easily shown by a contrast between the spoken word and > visual image. In HC, the narrator says: My New Year's Resolution is to be > kinder to others.... while the film shows the speaker agressively expelling > a young man from a party. The risk of demonstrating unreliability less > directly is that it may beceome obscure, though The Usual Suspects did it > admirably. my question: why do we privilege the video over the audio so automatically, or intuitively [not to say "naturally"] that most of us--like peter--can simply take it as a given requiring no further comment that when the video and audio clash, the video is telling the truth?? i know that this seems intuitively right, and i know that this is the convention that hollywood has regularly used (cf. don lockwood's opening autobiographical narrative in SITR) . . . but those are not answers, i think, they are symptoms of the question . . . something more must be going on here, and i'm eager to find new ways of thinking about the question mike frank ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]