Narrative Comprehension and Film

6

OBJECTIVITY AND UNCERTAINTY

FROM SUBJECTIVITY TO INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Focalization of narrative through a character, whether explicit as in a point-of-view shot or implicit as in certain “expressive” uses of technique, is dependent upon the possibility of its opposite: a refusal to focalize. In this chapter, I wish to examine the conditions which govern our perception of images and sounds when we imagine that we experience them independently of a character, even if we imagine that a character might also have had, or will have, similar experiences. What we see is diegetically intersubjective, or “objective,” in the sense that it is reported independently by a narrator, or else appears seemingly without any mediation as a “fact” of some kind. In ...