Ed O'Neill comments:
 
 
> On the "narrative flaws" in _Saving Private Ryan_, I think
> the logical coherence of Hollywood film is often
> over-emphasized.  General audiences are quite a bit more
> flexible in what they expect than devoted fans and even
> scholars.  Those in the latter group tend to want to
> construct rules and theories, while the general audience
> often doesn't care.
>
> And filmmakers, of course, will do whatever they think will
> elicit a strong response, narrative logic be damned.
>
> After all, _All About Eve_ switches narrators, _Sunset
> Boulevard_ is narrated by a dead man, and _Brief Encounter_
> includes a scene at which the female narrator is not
> present:  presumably no one ran screaming from the theaters
> clutching their heads in total incomprehension.  Even _The
> Usual Suspects_ was just a joyride, as far as most audiences
> seemed to be concerned.
 
A very good observation, but I think further distinctions need to be
made and they need to be placed within personal and historical contexts
that are beyond my powers to attempt right now.  Briefly, I'd agree
that narrative coherence has only the importance that filmmakers,
critics and audiences want it to have--to varying degrees.  For
example, having a first-person narration that provides information that
the teller could not directly know is a long-established convention:
CITIZEN KANE does it; so does TITANIC.
 
On the other hand, I think that some screenwriters and directors have
obsessed more about narrative logic than others, and I suspect that
such obsession has been more typical of a bygone era that was governed
by formalist norms of the work of art as unified whole, a set of norms
that hasn't disappeared but that was considerably weakened by the onset
of postmodernism.  Some of the more famous, if apocryphal, debates
about the nature of film art have dealt with issues such as whether a
scene taken from inside a fireplace won't make the audience imagine
that it's about to go up in flames!
 
Finally, there are those directors (and writers too) who like to tweak
the conventions and play with the norms.  SUNSET BOULEVARD is a good
example of a writer-director who loved to do that kind of thing.
 
Don Larsson
 
 
 
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Donald Larsson
Minnesota State U, Mankato
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