Lang Thompson wonders: > Inspired by "The Usual Suspects," I wondered how many films have the > equivalent of literary unreliable narrators or indeed what that would > consist of in a film. I think specifically it would have to be where the > viewers actually witness the events described or done in flashback as > opposed to a speaker or narrator who is simply not telling the truth > verbally. There's been quite a bit of discussion about this issue over the years, often depending on discussion of particular films. One of the more notorious (so to speak) examples has been Hitchcock's STAGE FRIGHT, which supposedly "lies" visually as well as through the voice-over narrator telling a story. Some of the conversation involves the definition of what "cinematic narration" actually consists of. See Seymour Chatman's COMING TO TERMS for one attempt to deal with the question of agency in narration. Maureen Turim's FLASHBACKS IN FILM also provides a useful set of perspectives on the uses of that device. There are different levels and types of unreliability, I think, and much of it has as much to do with audience readiness or willingness or ability to "read" a narration as "unreliable" as the process by which the actual narration occurs. Unreliability might be a function of revelation: an understanding that occurs at or toward the end of the film that requires rethinking all that we've seen before. (THE USUAL SUSPECTS does this, as does NO WAY OUT, the remake of THE BIG CLOCK with Costner.) It might be a function of revealing that we have been "misled" by what we seem to have witnessed. (THE USUAL SUSPECTS is an example here.) In a variation on that state is our awareness of several versions of the "truth" that may or may not resolve themselves in favor of one version (MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS could be an example, but so is RASHOMON.) A more complex version of "unreliability" in literary narration has to do with our awareness as readers that the narrator is not necessarily misrepresenting the facts but is certainly misinterpreting them in some way. (Classic examples include Ford Madox Ford's THE GOOD SOLIDER and Nabokov's PALE FIRE.) Since that level of misrepresentation and double-level of reader consciousness rely so often on first-person narration, which is difficult if not impossible to represent in film in a fully-equivalent way, the issue becomes more complicated. There's been some discussion of related issues on the NARRATIVE discussion list as well as MOVIES-SEIVOM, which discusses self-referentiality in film. It's a complex and interesting set of questions! Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson, Mankato State U (MN) [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite