Product Description

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal "voice": the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual ) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of "narrator" -- of a work-internal of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal . It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's , von Sternberg's , and the Coen brothers' .