9. Classical Narration
The Hollywood Example
In fictional filmmaking, one mode of narration has achieved predominance. Whether we call it mainstream, dominant, or classical cinema, we intuitively recognize an ordinary, easily comprehensible movie when we see it. Our survey of narrational modes can properly start with this classical tradition, since it relies on the strongest schemata and the most prevalent extrinsic norms. Our example will be the most historically influential classicism: Hollywood studio filmmaking of the years 1917 to i960. The concepts developed so far in this book allow us to analyze classical Hollywood narration with considerable precision. We do not need to fall back on cliches like "transparency," "seamlessness," "invisibility," "concealment of production," or "discours posing as histoire." We can define classical narration as a particular configuration of normalized options for representing the fabula and for manipulating the possibilities of syuzhet and style. This approach will also enable us to suggest a more dynamic account of the spectator's role.1
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Canonic Narration
lltv <. lassical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or p attain specific goals. In the course of this struggle, the characters enter into conflict with others or with external 'circumstances. The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem and a clear achievement oi iionachievement of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character, a discriminated individual endowed with a consistent batch of evident traits, qualities, and behaviors. Although the cinema inherits many conventions of portrayal from theater and literature, the character types of melodrama and popular fiction get fleshed out by the addition of unique motifs, habits, or behavioral tics. In parallel fashion, the star system has as one of its functions the creation of a rou gh character prototype for each star which is ilien adjusted to the particular needs of the role. The most "specified" character is usually the protagonist, who becomes the principal causal agent, the target of any narra-uonal restriction, and the chief object of audience identifica-non. These features of the syuzhet will come as no surprise,
i hough already there are important differences from other narrational modes (e.g., the comparative absence of consistent and goal-oriented characters in art-cinema narration).
Of all modes, the classical one conforms most closely to tl ie "canonic story" which story-comprehension researchers posit as normal for our culture. In fabula terms, the reliance upon character-centered causality and the definition of the action as the attempt to achieve a goal are both salient natures of the canonic format.2 At the level of the syuzhet,
iI ie classical film respects the canonic pattern of establishing an initial state of affairs which gets violated and which must then be set right. Indeed, Hollywood screenplay-writing manuals have long insisted on a formula which has been revived in recent structural analysis: the plot consists of an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance.3 Such a syuzhet pattern is the inheritance not of some monolithic construct called the
"novelistic" but of specific historical forms: the well-made play, the popular romance, and, crucially, the late-nineteenth-century short story.4 The characters' causal interactions are thus to a great extent functions of such overarching syuzhet/fabula patterns.
In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. Analogies between characters, settings, and situations are certainly present, but at the denotative level any parallelism is subordinated to the movement of cause and effect.5 Spatial configurations are motivated by realism (a newspaper office must contain desks, typewriters, phones) and, chiefly, by compositional necessity (the desk and typewriter will be used to write causally significant news stories; the phones form crucial links among characters). Causality also motivates temporal principles of organization: the syuzhet represents the order, frequency, and duration of fabula events in ways which bring out the salient causal relations. This process is especially evident in a device highly characteristic of classical narration—the deadline. A deadline can be measured by calendars (Around the World in Eighty 'Days), by clocks (High Noon), by stipulation ("You've got a week but not a minute longer"), or simply by cues that time is running out (the last-minute rescue). That the climax of a classical film is often a deadline shows the structural power of defining dramatic duration as the time it takes to achieve or fail to achieve a goal.
Usually the classical syuzhet presents a double causal structure, two plot lines: one involving heterosexual romance (boy/girl, husband/wife), the other line involving another sphere—work, war, a mission or quest, other personal relationships. Each line will possess a goal, obstacles, and a climax. In Wild and Woolly (1917), the hero, Jeff, has two goals—to live a wild Western life and to court Nell, the woman of his dreams. The plot can be complicated by several lines, such as countervailing goals (the people of Bitter Creek want Jeff to get them a railroad spur, a crooked Indian agent wants to pull a robbery) or multiple romances (as in Footlight Parade and Meet Me in St. Louis). In most cases, the romance sphere and the other sphere of action are dis-
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tinct but interdependent. The plot may close off one line before the other, but often the two lines coincide at the climax: resolving one triggers the resolution of the other. In His Girl Friday, the reprieve of Earl Williams precedes the reconciliation of Walter and Hildy, but it is also the condition of the couple's reunion.
The syuzhet is always broken up into segments. In the silent era, the typical Hollywood film would contain between nine and eighteen sequences; in the sound era, between fourteen and thirty-five (with postwar films tending to have more sequences). Speaking roughly, there are only two types of Hollywood segments: "montage sequences" (compromising Metz's third, fourth, and eighth syntagmatic types) and "scenes" (Metz's fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth types).6 Hollywood narration clearly demarcates its scenes by neoclassical criteria—unity of time (continuous or consistently intermittent duration), space (a definable locale), and action (a distinct cause-effect phase). The bounds of the sequence will be marked by some standardized punctuations (dissolve, fade, wipe, sound bridge).7 Raymond Bellour points out that the classical segment tends also to define itself microcosmically (through internal repetitions of style or story material) and macrocosmically (by parallels with other segments of the same magnitude).8 We must also remember that each film establishes its own scale of segmentation. A syuzhet which concentrates on a single locale over a limited dramatic duration (e.g., the one-night-in-a-haunted-house film) may create segments by character entrances or exits, a theatrical liaison des scenes. In a film which spans decades and many locales, a series of dissolves from one small action to another will not necessarily constitute distinct sequences.
The classical segment is not a sealed entity. Spatially and temporally it is closed, but causally it is open. It works to advance the causal progression and open up new developments.9 The pattern of this forward momentum is quite codified. The montage sequence tends to function as a transitional summary, condensing a single causal development, but the scene of character action—the building block of classical Hollywood dramaturgy—is more intricately con-
structed. Each scene displays distinct phases. First comes the exposition, which specifies the time, place, and relevant characters—their spatial positions and their current states of mind (usually as a result of previous scenes). In the middle of the scene, characters act toward their goals: they struggle, make choices, make appointments, set deadlines, and plan future events. In the course of this, the classical scene continues or closes off cause-effect developments left dangling in prior scenes while also opening up new causal lines for future development. At least one line of action must be left suspended, in order to motivate the shifts to the next scene, which picks up the suspended line (often via a "dialogue hook"). Hence the famous "linearity" of classical construction—a trait not characteristic of Soviet montage films (which often refuse to demarcate scenes clearly) or of art-cinema narration (with its ambiguous interplay of subjectivity and objectivity).
Here is a simple example. In The Killers (1946), the insurance investigator Riordan has been hearing Lieutenant Lubinsky's account of Ole Anderson's early life. At the end of the scene, Lubinsky tells Riordan that they're burying Ole today. This dangling cause leads to the next scene, set in the cemetery. An establishing shot provides spatial exposition. While the clergyman intones the funeral oration, Riordan asks Lubinsky the identity of various mourners. The last, a solitary old man, is identified as "an old-time hoodlum named Charleston." Dissolve to a pool hall, with Charleston and Riordan at a table drinking and talking about Ole. During the burial scene, the Lubinsky line of inquiry is closed off and the Charleston line is initiated. When the scene halts, Charleston is left suspended, but he is picked up immediately in the exposition of the next scene. Instead of a complex braiding of causal lines (as in the films of Rivette) or an abrupt breaking of them (as in Antonioni, Godard, or Bresson), the classical Hollywood film spins them out in smooth, careful linearity.
Something else contributes to this linearity. The mystery film, with its resolved enigma at the end, is only the most apparent instance of the tendency of the classical syuzhet to develop toward full and adequate knowledge. Whether a
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nnUJi?onlst learns amoral lesson or only the spectator knows the whole story, the classical film moves steadily toward a yr«.>" i11S awareness of absolute truth.
riu- linkage of causal lines must eventually terminate. How to conclude the syuzhet? There are two ways of regarding the classical ending. We can see it as the crowning of the iinu uire, the logical conclusion of the string of events, the IiimI effect of the initial cause, the revelation of the truth. ] in-, ^ lew has some validity, not only in the light of the tight loii-iMiction that we frequently encounter in Hollywood films liut also given the precepts of Hollywood screenwrit-ing. Rule books tirelessly bemoan the pressures for a happy ending and emphasize the need for a logical wrap-up. Still, ilu re are enough instances of unmotivated or inadequate plot resolutions to suggest a second hypothesis: that the classical ending is not all that structurally decisive, being a more or less arbitrary readjustment of that world knocked aw rv in the previous eighty minutes. Parker Tyler suggests ill it Hollywood regards all endings as "purely conventional, Ini mal, and often, like the charade, of an infantile logic."10 1 lere again we see the importance of the plot line involving lu terosexual romance. It is significant that of one hundred rardomly sampled Hollywood films, over sixty ended with a display of the united romantic couple—the cliche happy ending, often with a "clinch"—and many more could be said to end happily. Thus an extrinsic norm, the need to resolve ilin plot in a way that yields "poetic justice," provides a structural constant, inserted with more or less motivation nilo its proper slot, the epilogue. In any narrative, as Meir Sumberg points out, when the syuzhet's end is strongly precast by convention, the compositional attention falls on the retardation accomplished by the middle portions; the ii \t will then "account for the necessary retardation in quasi-mimetic terms by placing the causes for delay within the Active world itself and turning the middle into the bulk of ,thc represented action."11 At times, however, the motivation fails, and a discordance between preceding causality and Ii ppy denouement may become noticeable as an ideological difficulty; such is the case with films like You Only Live Once, Suspicion, The Woman in the Window, and The
Wrong Man.12 We ought, then, to be prepared for either a skillful tying up of all loose ends or a more or less miraculous appearance of what Brecht called bourgeois literature's mounted messenger. "The mounted messenger guarantees you a truly undisturbed appreciation of even the most intolerable conditions, so it is a sine qua non for a literature whose sine qua non is that it leads nowhere."13
The classical ending may be a sore spot in another respect. Even if the ending resolves the two principal causal lines, some comparatively minor issues may still be left dangling. For example, the fates of secondary characters may go unsettled. In His Girl Friday, Earl Williams is reprieved, the corrupt administration will be thrown out of office, and Walter and Hildy are reunited, but we never learn what happens to Molly Malloy, who jumped out a window to distract the reporters. (We know only that she was alive after the fall.) One could argue that in the resolution of the main problem we forget minor matters, but this is only a partial explanation. Our forgetting is promoted by the device of closing the film with an epilogue, a brief celebration of the stable state achieved by the main characters. Not only does the epilogue reinforce the tendency toward a happy ending; it also repeats connotative motifs that have run throughout the film. His Girl Friday closes on a brief epilogue of Walter and Hildy calling the newspaper office to announce their remarriage. They learn that a stixke has started in Albany, and Walter proposes stopping off to cover it on their honeymoon. This plot twist announces a repetition of what happened on their first honeymoon and recalls that Hildy was going to marry Bruce and live in Albany. As the couple leave, Hildy carrying her suitcase, Walter suggests that Bruce might put them up. The neat recurrence of these motifs gives the narration a strong unity; when such details are so tightly bound together, Molly Malloy's fate is more likely to be overlooked. Perhaps instead of "closure" it would be better to speak of a "closure effect," or even, if the strain of resolved and unresolved issues seems strong, of "pseudoclosure." At the level of extrinsic norms, though, the most coherent possible epilogue remains the standard to be aimed at.
Commonplaces like "transparency" and "invisibility" are
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on the whole unhelpful in specifying the narrational properties of the classical film. Very generally, we can say that classical narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious. That is, the narration knows more than all the characters, conceals relatively little (chiefly "what will happen next"), and seldom acknowledges its own address to the audience. But we must qualify this characterization in two respects. First, generic factors often create variations upon these precepts. A detective film will be quite restricted in its range of knowledge and highly suppressive in concealing causal information. A melodrama like In This Our Life can be slighdy more self-conscious than The Big Sleep, especially in its use of acting and music. A musical will contain codified moments of self-consciousness (e.g., when characters sing direcdy out at the viewer). Second, the temporal progression of the syuzhet makes narrational properties fluctuate across the film, and these fluctuations too are codified. Typically, the opening and closing of the film are the most self-conscious, omniscient, and communicative passages. The credit sequence and the first few shots usually bear traces of an overt narration. Once the action has started, however, the narration becomes more covert, letting the characters and their interaction take over the transmission of information. Overt narrational activity returns at certain conventional moments: the beginnings and endings of scenes (e.g., establishing shots, shots of signs, camera movements out from or in to significant objects, symbolic dissolves), and summary passages known as "montage sequences." At the very close of the syuzhet, the narration may again acknowledge its awareness of the audience (nondiegetic music reappears, characters look to the camera or close a door in our face), its omniscience (e. g., the camera retreats to a long shot), and its communicativeness (now we know all). Classical narration is thus not equally "invisible" in every type of film or throughout any one film.
The communicativeness of classical narration is evident in the way that the syuzhet handles gaps. If time is skipped over, a montage sequence or a bit of character dialogue informs us; if a cause is missing, we will typically be in-
formed that something isn't there. And gaps will seldom be permanent. "In the beginning of the motion picture," writes one scenarist, "we don't know anything. During the course of the story, information is accumulated, until at the end we know everything."14 Again, these principles can be mitigated by generic motivation. A mystery might suppress a gap (e.g., the opening of Mildred Pierce)^ a fantasy might leave a cause still questionable at the end (e.g., The Enchanted Cottage). In this respect, Citizen Kane remains somewhat "unclassi-cal": the narration supplies the answer to the "Rosebud" mystery, but the central traits of Kane's character remain pardy undetermined, and no generic motivation justifies this.
The syuzhet's construction of time powerfully shapes the fluctuating overtness of narration. When the syuzhet adheres to chronological order and omits the causally unimportant periods of time, the narration becomes highly communicative and unselfconscious. On the other hand, when a montage sequence compresses a political campaign, a murder trial, or the effects of Prohibition into moments, the narration becomes overtly omniscient. A flashback can quickly and covertly fill a causal gap. Redundancy can be achieved without violating the fabula world if the narration represents each story event several times in the syuzhet, through one enactment and several recountings in character dialogue. Deadlines neady let the syuzhet unselfconsciously respect the durational limits that the fabula world sets for its action. When it is necessary to su ggest repeated or habitual actions, the montage sequence will again do nicely, as Sartre noted when he praised Citizen Kane's montages for achieving the equivalent of the "frequentative" tense: "He made his wife sing in every theatre in America. "15 When the syuzhet uses a newspaper headline to cover gaps of time, we recognize both the narration's omniscience and its relatively low profile. (The public record is less self-conscious than an intertitle "coming straight from" the narration.) More generally, classical narration reveals its discretion by posing as an editorial intelligence that selects certain stretches of time for full-scale treatment (the scenes), pares down others a little, presents others in highly compressed fashion (the
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nnuii i^e sequences), and simply scissors out events that are K(,I1M:quential. When fabula duration is expanded, it is done through crosscutting, as we have seen in our consideration of The Birth of a Nation (p. 84).
Overall narrational qualities also get manifested in the jilii]«. manipulation of space. Figures are adjusted for moderate self-consciousness by angling the bodies more or less frontally but avoiding to-camera gazes (except, of course, in optical point-of-view passages). That no causally significant cues m a scene are left unknown testifies to the communicativeness of the narration. Most important is the tendency of the classical film to render narrational omniscience as spatial omnipresence.18 If the narration plays down its knowledge of upcoming events, it does not hesitate to reveal its ability to change views at will by cutting within a scene and crosscutting between various locales. Writing in 1935, a critic claims that the camera is omniscient in that it "stimulates, through correct choice of subject matter and set-up, the sense within the percipient of 'being at the most vital pait of the experience—at the most advantageous point of perception' throughout the picture."17 Whereas Miklos Jancsd's long takes create spatial patterns that refuse omnipresence and thus drastically restrict the spectator's knowledge of story information, classical omnipresence makes the cognitive schema we call "the camera" into an ideal invisible observer, freed from the contingencies of space and time but discreetly confining itself to codified patterns for the sake of story intelligibility.
By virtue of its handling of space and time, classical narration makes the fabula world an internally consistent construct into which narration seems to step from the outside. Manipulation of mise-en-scene (figure behavior, lighting, setting, costume) creates an apparently independent pro-filmic event, which becomes the tangible story world framed and recorded from without. This framing and recording tends to be taken as the narration itself, which can in turn be more or less overt, more or less "intrusive" upon the posited homogeneity of the story world. Classical narration thus depends upon the notion of the invisible observer.18 Bazin, for instance, portrays the classical scene as existing inde-
pendently of narration, as if on a stage.19 The same quality is named by the notion of "concealment of production": the fabula seems not to have been constructed; it appears to have preexisted its narrational representation. (In production, in some sense, it often did: for major films of the 1930s and thereafter, Hollywood set designers created toy sets within which model cameras, actors, and lighting units could be placed to predetermine filming procedures.)20
This "invisible-observer" narration is itself often fairly effaced, for stylistic causes that I shall examine shortly. But we can already see that classical narration quickly cues us to construct story logic (causality, parallelisms), time, and space in ways that make the events "before the camera" our principal source of information. For example, it is obvious that Hollywood narratives are highly redundant, but this effect is achieved principally by patterns attributable to the story world. Following Susan Suleiman's taxonomy,21 we can see that the narration assigns the same traits and functions to each character on her or his appearance; different characters present the same interpretive commentary on the same character or situation; similar events involve different characters; and so on. Information is for the most part repeated by characters' dialogue or demeanor. There is also some redundancy between narrational commentary and depicted fabula action, as when silent film expository intertides convey crucial information or when nondiegetic music is pleonastic with the action (e.g., "Here Comes the Bride" in In This Our Life). But, in general, the narration is so constructed that characters and their behavior produce and reiterate the necessary story data. (The Soviet montage cinema makes much stronger use of redundancies between narrational commentary and fabula action.) Retardation operates in analogous fashion: the construction of the total fabula is delayed principally by inserted lines of action, such as causally relevant subplots, interpolated comedy bits, and musical numbers (rather than by narrational digressions of the sort found in the "God and Country" sequence of October). Similarly, causal gaps in the fabula are usually signaled by character actions (e.g., the discovery of clues in detective films). The viewer concentrates on constructing the fabula,
HISTORICAL MODES OF NARRATION
not on asking why the narration is representing the fabula in this particular way—a question more typical of art-cinema narration.
The priority of causality within an integral fabula world commits classical narration to unambiguous presentation. Whereas art-cinema narration can blur the lines separating objective diegetic reality, characters' mental states, and inserted narrational commentary, the classical film asks us to assume clear distinctions among these states. When the classical film restricts knowledge to a character, as in most of The Big Sleep and Murder My Sweet, there is nonetheless a firm borderline between subjective and objective depiction. Of course the narration can set traps for us, as in Possessed, when a murder that appears to be objective is revealed to have been subjective (a generically motivated switch, incidentally); but the hoax is revealed immediately and unequivocally. The classical flashback is revealing in this connection. Its presence is almost invariably motivated subjectively, since a character's recollection triggers the enacted representation of a prior event. But the range of knowledge in the flashback portion is often not identical with that of the character doing the remembering. It is common for the flashback to show us more than the character can know (e.g., scenes in which she or he is not present). An amusing example occurs in Ten North Frederick. The bulk of the film is presented as the daughter's flashback, but at the end of the syuzhet, back in the present, she learns for the first time information we had encountered in "her" flashback! Classical flashbacks are typically "objective": character memory is a pretext for a nonchronological syuzhet arrangement. Similarly, optically subjective shots become anchored in an objective context. One writer notes that a point-of-view shot "must be motivated by, and definitely linked to, the objective scenes [shots] that precede and follow it."22 This is one source of the power of the invisible-observer effect: the camera seems always to include character subjectivity within a broader and definite objectivity.
Classical Style
Even if the naive spectator takes the style of the classical Hollywood film to be invisible or seamless, this is not much critical help. What makes the style so self-effacing? The question cannot be completely answered until we consider the spectator's activity, but we may start with Yuri Tynianov's suggestion: "Pointing to the 'restraint' or 'naturalism' of the style in the case of some film or some director is not the same as sweeping away the role of style. Quite simply, there are a variety of styles and they have various roles, according to their relationship to the development of the syuzhet."23 Three general propositions, then.
i. On the whole, classical narration treats film technique as a vehicle for the syuzhet's transmission of fabula information. Of all modes of narration, the classical is most concerned to motivate style compositionally, as a function of syuzhet patterning. Consider the very notion of what we now call a shot. For decades, Hollywood practice called a shot a "scene," thus conflating a material stylistic unit with a dramaturgical one. In classical filmmaking, the overriding principle is to make every instantiation of technique obedient to the character's transmission of fabula information, with the result that bodies and faces become the focal points of attention. Film techniques are patterned to fit the causal structure of the classical scene (exposition, closing off of an old causal factor, introduction of new causal factors, suspension of a new factor). The introduction phase typically includes a shot which establishes the characters in space and time. As the characters interact, the scene is broken up into closer views of action and reaction, while setting, lighting, music, composition, and camera movement enhance the process of goal formulation, struggle, and decision. The scene usually closes on a portion of the space—a facial reaction, a significant object—that provides a transition to the next scene.
While it is true that sometimes a classical film's style becomes "excessive," decoratively supplementing denotative syuzhet demands, the use of technique must be minimally motivated by the characters' interactions. "Excess," such as we find in Minnelli or Sirk, is often initially justified by generic convention. The same holds true for even the
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'most eccentric stylists in Hollywood, Busby Berkeley and Uosei'von Sternberg, each of whom required a core of generic nioiivation (musical fantasy and exotic romance, respectively) for his experiments.
In classical narration, style typically encourages the spectator to construct a coherent, consistent time and space for the fabula action. Many other narrational norms value disi denting the spectator, albeit for different purposes. Only classical narration favors a style which strives for utmost „}• denotative clarity from moment to moment. Each scene's temporal relation to its predecessor will be signaled early and unequivocally (by intertitles, conventional cues, a line of dialogue). Lighting must pick out figure from ground; color must define planes; in each shot, the center of story interest will be near the center of the frame. Sound recording is perfected so as to allow for maximum clarity of dialogue. Camera movements aim to create an unambiguous, voluminous space. "In dollying," remarks Allan Dwan, "as a rule we
find it's a good idea to pass things____We always noticed that
if we dollied past a tree, it became solid and round, instead of flat."24 Hollywood makes much use of the anticipatory composition or camera movement, leaving space in the frame for the action or tracking so as to prepare for another character's entrance. Compare Godard's tendency to make framing wholly subservient to the actor's immediate movement with this comment of Raoul Walsh's: "There is only one way in which to shoot a scene, and that's the way which shows the audience what's happening next."25 Classical editing aims at making each shot the logical outcome of its predecessor and at reorienting the spectator through repeated setups. Momentary disorientation is permissible only if motivated realistically. The hallucinatory murder in Possessed that at first appears to have objectively occurred is justified retrospectively by the protagonist's increasing madness. Discontinuous editing, as in Slavko Vorkapich's montage sequence depicting the earthquake in San Francisco, gets motivated by the chaos of the action depicted. Stylistic disorientation, in short, is permissible when it conveys disorienting story situations.
3. Classical style consists of a strictly limited number of particular technical devices organized into a stable para-
digm and ranked probabilistically according to syuzhet demands. The stylistic conventions of Hollywood narration, ranging from shot composition to sound mixing, are intuitively recognizable to most viewers. This is because the style deploys a limited number of devices and these devices are regulated as alternative depictive options. Lighting offers a simple example. A scene may be lit "high-key" or "low-key." There is three-point lighting (key, fill, and backlighting on figure, plus background lighting) versus single-source lighting. The cinematographer also has several degrees of diffusion available. Now, in the abstract all choices are equiprobable, but in a given context, one alternative is more likely than its mates. In a comedy, high-key lighting is more probable; a dark street will realistically motivate single-source lighting; the close-up of a woman will be more heavily diffused than that of a man. The "invisibility" of the classical style in Hollywood relies not only on highly codified stylistic devices but also upon their codified functions in context.
A similarly restricted paradigm controls the framing of the human figure. Most often, a character will be framed between plan americain (the knees-up framing) and medium close-up (the chest-up framing); the angle will be straight on, at shoulder or chin level. The framing is less likely to be an extreme long shot or an extreme close-up, a high or low angle. And a bird's eye view or a view from straight below is very improbable and would require compositional or generic motivation (e. g., as an optical point of view or as a view of a dance ensemble in a musical).
Most explicidy codified into rules is the system of classical continuity editing. The reliance upon an axis of action orients the spectator to the space, and the subsequent cutting presents clear paradigmatic choices among different kinds of "matches." That these are weighted probabilistically is shown by the fact that most Hollywood scenes begin with establishing shots, break the space into closer views linked by eyeline matches and/or shot/reverse shots, and return to more distant views only when character movement or the entry of a new character requires the viewer to be reoriented. An entire scene without an establishing shot is unlikely but permissible (especially if stock or location foot-
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age or special effects are employed); mismatched screen direction and inconsistently angled eyelines are less likely; perceptible jump cuts and unmotivated cutaways are flatly forbidden. This paradigmatic aspect makes the classical style, for all its "rules," not a timeless formula or recipe but a historically constrained set of more or less likely options.26
These three factors go some way to explaining why the classical Hollywood style passes relatively unnoticed. Each film will recombine familiar devices within fairly predictable patterns and according to the demands of the syuzhet. The spectator will amost never be at a loss to grasp a stylistic feature because he or she is oriented in time and space and because stylistic figures will be interpretable in the light of a paradigm.
When we consider the relation of syuzhet and style, we can say that the classical film is characterized by its obedience to a set of extrinsic norms which govern both syuzhet construction and stylistic patterning. The classical cinema does not encourage the film to cultivate idiosyncratic intrinsic norms; style and syuzhet seldom enjoy prominence. A film's principal innovations occur at the level of the fabula— i.e., "new stories." Of course, syuzhet devices and stylistic features have changed over time. But the fundamental principles of syuzhet construction (preeminence of causality, goal-oriented protagonist, deadlines, etc.) have remained in force since 1917. The stability and uniformity of Hollywood narration yield one reason to call it classical, at least insofar as classicism in any art is traditionally characterized by obedience to extrinsic norms.27
The Classical Spectator
The stability of syuzhet processes and stylistic configurations in the classical film should not make us treat the classical spectator as passive material for a totalizing machine. The spectator performs particular cognitive operations which are no less active for being habitual and familiar. The Hollywood fabula is the product of a series of particular schemata, hypotheses, and inferences.
The spectator comes to a classical film very well prepared. The rough shape of syuzhet and fabula is likely to conform to the canonic story of an individual's goal-oriented, causally determined activity. The spectator knows the most likely stylistic figures and functions. He or she has internalized the scenic norm of exposition, development of old causal line, and so forth. The viewer also knows the pertinent ways to motivate what is presented. "Realistic" motivation, in this mode, consists of making connections recognized as plausible by common opinion. (A man like this would naturally...) Compositional motivation consists of picking out the important links of cause to effect. The most important forms of transtextual motivation are recognizing the recurrence of a star's persona from film to film and recognizing generic conventions. Generic motivation, as we have seen, has a particularly strong effect on narrational procedures. Finally, artistic motivation—taking an element as being present for its own sake—is not unknown in the classical film. A moment of spectacle or technical virtuosity, a thrown-in musical number or comic interlude: the Hollywood cinema intermittently welcomes the possibility of sheer self-absorption. Such moments may be highly reflexive, "baring the device" of the narration's own work, as when in Angels over Broadway a destitute playwright reflects, "Our present plot problem is money."
On the basis of such schemata the viewer projects hypotheses. Hypotheses tend to be probable (validated at several points), sharply exclusive (rendered as either/or alternatives), and aimed at suspense (positing a future outcome). In Roaring Timber, a landowner enters a saloon in which our hero is sitting. The owner is looking for a tough foreman. Hypothesis; he will ask the hero to take the job. This hypothesis is probable, future-oriented, and exclusive (either the man will ask our hero or he won't). The viewer is helped in framing such hypotheses by several processes. Repetition reaffirms the data on which hypotheses should be grounded. "State every important fact three times," suggests scenarist Frances Marion, "for the play is lost if the audience fails to understand the premises on which it is based. "2S The exposition of past fabula action will characteristically be placed within the early scenes of the syuzhet, thus supplying a firm
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basis for our hypothesis-forming. Except in a mystery film, the exposition neither sounds warning signals nor actively . misleads us; the primacy effect is given full sway. Characters will be introduced in typical behavior, while the star system reaffirms first impressions. ("The moment you see Walter Pidgeon in a film you know he could not do a mean or petty thing."29) The device of the deadline asks the viewer to construct forward-aiming, all-or-nothing causal hypotheses: either the protagonist will achieve the goal in time or he will ,not. And if information is unobtrusively "planted" early on, later hypotheses will become more probable by taking "insignificant" foreshadowing material for granted.
This process holds at the stylistic level as well. The spectator constructs fabula time and space according to schemata, cues, and hypothesis-framing. Hollywood's extrinsic norms, with their fixed devices and paradigmatic organization, supply the viewer with firm expectations that can be measured against the concrete cues emitted by the film. In making sense of a scene's space, the spectator need not I mentally replicate every detail of the space but only construct a rough relational map of the principal dramatic factors. Thus a "cheat cut" is easily ignored because the spectator's cognitive processes rank cues by their pertinence to constructing the ongoing causal chain of the fabula, and on this scale, the changes in speaker, camera position, and facial expression are more noteworthy than, say, a slight ~ shift in hand positions.30 The same goes for temporal mismatches.
What is rare in the classical film, then, is Henry James's "crooked corridor," the use of narration to make us jump to ,., invalid conclusions.31 The avoidance of disorientation we saw at work in classical style holds true for syuzhet construction as well. Future-oriented "suspense" hypotheses are more important than past-oriented "curiosity" ones, and surprise is less important than either. In Roaring Timber, imagine if the landowner had entered the bar seeking a tough foreman, offered the job to our hero, and he had replied in a fashion that showed he was not tough. Indeed, one purpose of foreshadowing and repetition is exactly to avoid surprises later on. Of course, if all hypotheses were steadily and immediately confirmed, the viewer would quickly lose interest.
Several factors intervene to complicate the process. Most generally, schemata are by definition abstract prototypes, structures, and procedures, and these never specify all the properties of the text. Many long-range hypotheses must await confirmation. Retardation devices, being unpredictable to a great degree, can introduce objects of immediate attention as well as delay satisfaction of overall expectation. The primacy effect can be countered by a "recency effect" which qualifies and perhaps even appears to negate our first impression of a character or situation. Furthermore, the structure of the Hollywood scene, which almost invariably ends with an unresolved issue, assures that an event-centered hypothesis carries interest over to the next sequence. Finally, we should not underestimate the role of rapid rhythm in the classical film; more than one practitioner has stressed the need to move the construction of story action along so quickly that the audience has no time to reflect—or get bored. It is the task of classical narration to solicit strongly probable and exclusive hypotheses and then confirm them while still maintaining variety in the concrete working out of the action.
The classical system is not simpleminded. Recall that under normal exhibition circumstances the film viewer's rate of comprehension is absolutely controlled. The cueing of probable, exclusive, and suspense-oriented hypotheses is a way of adjusting dramaturgy to the demands of the viewing situation. The spectator need not rummage very far back into the film, since his or her expectations are aimed at the future. Preliminary exposition locks schemata into place quickly, and the all-or-nothing nature of most hypotheses allows rapid assimilation of information. Redundancy keeps attention on the issue of immediate moment, while judicious lacks of redundancy allow for minor surprises later. In all, classical narration manages the controlled pace of film viewing by asking the spectator to construe the syuzhet and the stylistic system in a single way: construct a denotative, uni-vocal, integral fabula.
By virtue of its centrality within international film commerce, Hollywood cinema has crucially influenced most other national cinemas. After 1917, the dominant forms of filmmaking abroad were deeply affected by the models of
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HISTORICAL MODES OF NARRATION
storytelling presented by the American studios. Yet the Hollywood cinema cannot be identified with classicism tout court. The "classicism" of 1930s Italy or 1950s Poland may mobilize quite different narrational devices. (For instance, the happy ending seems more characteristic of Hollywood than of other classicisms.) But most of classical narration's principles and functions can be considered congruent with those outlined here. A group of Parisian researchers has come to comparable, if preliminary, conclusions about French films of the 1930s.32 Noel Burch has shown that in the German cinema, a mastery of classical style is displayed as early as 1922, in Lang's Dr. Mabuse der Spieler.33 As a narrational mode, classicism clearly corresponds to the idea of an "ordinary film" in most cinema-consuming countries of the world.
Seven Films, Eight Segments
The many variants of classicism make any overall periodiza-tion of the mode very difficult. Even the history of Hollywood norms is notoriously hard to delineate. This is pardy because significant periods in the history of studios or technology will not necessarily coincide with changes in stylistic or syuzhet processes. Broadly speaking, we could periodize classical Hollywood narration on two levels. With respect to procedures, we could trace changes within classical narrational paradigms, according to what options come into favor at certain periods. Here we should look not only for innovations but for normalization, majority or customary practice. Connecting scenes by dissolves is possible but rare in the silent cinema, yet it is the favored transition between 1929 and the late 1960s. With respect to narrational principles, we could study how classical films assume narrative causality, time, and space to be constructed. Spatial continuity within a scene can be achieved by selecting from several functionally equivalent techniques, but such continuity rests on broader principles too, such as the positing of the 180-degree line, or axis of action; and changes in this postulate can be traced across the Hollywood cinema. Also within the domain of principles are the fluctuations of broader narrational prop-
erties. For instance, narration in the silent cinema tends to be somewhat more self-conscious than in the sound cinema, if only because of expository intertitles. Similarly, an insistent suppressiveness emerges in many films associated with the grouping known as film noir.
No single film, or even a dozen films, can exhaustively characterize a narrational mode. Because particular devices vary across periods, and because norms tend to be organized paradigmatically, any film must choose only a few possibilities to actualize. Part 1 has already considered four classical Hollywood films in some detail: Rear Window, The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, and In This Our Life. These have exemplified the viewer's role, the patterned fluctuations of narrational processes, and the effect of genre on narration. Rather than analyze yet another classical film in depth, we can more usefully broaden our scope to survey the breadth of the Hollywood paradigm and to map, however roughly, historical changes in syuzhet construction and stylistic composition. Let us, then, consider eight segments from seven films, arranged chronologically from 1917 to 1957. The seven films represent different studios, various genres, a range of directorial renown (from Lubitsch and Hawks to John Emerson and Lloyd Bacon), and a spectrum of stylistic trends (early talkie, film noir, wide screen). The segments are also laid out in syuzhet sequence, as if this were all one macrofilm running from prologue and opening scene to climax and epilogue.
Wild and Woolly (Artcraft, 1917)
A prologue establishes the romance of the Old West and contrasts it with the West today. The story proper begins in the mansion of Collis J. Hillington, a railroad tycoon. His son Jeff is obsessed with the Old West: he has a tepee in his room, dresses cowboy style, and is an expert roper and pistol shot. At breakfast Hillington tells his butler, Judson, to fetch Jeff to leave for the office. After Jeff playfully ropes Judson to a chair, demonstrates his marksmanship, and rides Judson downstairs like a rodeo star, Jeff leaves with his father. The prologue introduces an omniscient and frankly com-