ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter dealt with general narrative categories (narrative coherence, the sender and the recipient of the narrative discourse) as perceived or constructed by contemporary observers, this chapter will concentrate on the reception of the specific devices that constituted cinema's narrative system. As I have noted, this analysis will take as its starting point the notion of pre-cinematic (or, rather, extra-cinematic) narrative norms. But, before passing to a discussion of the actual aspects of film narrative as perceived against the narrative norms of the 1910s, I have to admit that these norms, as presented here, are not based on any kind of independent research. As far as I know, no research into them has been undertaken. My use of the notion is purely operational. I derive ‘norm’ ad hoc, by way of summing up reception-registered deviations from it. At first sight, such a method may appear faulty — in fact, it is not: this is more or less what anyone does in order to reconstruct expectational horizons. Early film spectators had certain expectations as to what constituted narrative norms: ellipses should be provided with conventional marks (the rule of narrative continuity); narrative elements should be subdivided into ‘main’ and ‘auxiliary’ (the rule of narrative focus); certain elements of the text should be repeatable, while others should not be (the rule of narrative economy); the pre-textual reality (the ‘text of life’) should be represented with varying degrees of mimetic precision (the rule of selectivity). Such expectations were far from being a rigid code of rules, but they give us some idea of the narrative norms to which cinema was expected — but failed — to conform. The list of narrative devices highlighted here does not pretend to be complete; it is not derived from an exhaustive analysis of actual films. There is a discussion of camera movement but there is no section on cross-cutting. Although, of course, part of the responsibility for any lacunae should lie on me as a researcher, the choice of what to discuss and what to ignore was largely dictated by the particular angle of my research. A historian may be expected to be encyclopaedic, but not the history itself — and certainly not the contemporary viewer. Some things were just not noticed or mentioned at the time. Other things were noticed and mentioned, but from the opposite point of view than that of the film-maker of the day. For example, production histories of film style discuss the various means of securing continuity because continuity was such a key problem in film-making. As to the viewer, he rather responded to discontinuity, which therefore defined my focus of research. In terms of saliency, reception is related to production as mould to cast. Therefore, no notes on reception can give a plausible historical picture unless they are complemented by the stylistic history of film-making. 1
