ABSTRACT
Film theory has always had particular problems with narrative. Was story-telling the cinema’s manifest destiny, as an earlier generation of historians used to think, or does “early cinema,” especially in the formula of the “cinema of attractions,” prove the exact opposite? How medium-specifi c is narrative, given that it is generally recognized as a quasi-universal way of making sense of experience? Is (classical) narrative a mode of world-making or “totality-thinking” that reveals or refl ects Western capitalism’s political unconscious (in Fredric Jameson’s sense)? Or can narratology, as a highly specialized and sophisticated trans-media discipline, manage to clarify the problems (e.g. levels of narration, enunciation, the role of the reader) that classical fi lm theory, based as it was on linguistic models, failed to resolve?
