The concept of reliability relies on our ability to
assess truth. Postmodernism holds that there are no
thruths that we can lay our finger on, only stories,
or "grand narratives". I still think it's possible to
isolate the problem of reliable narrative in film and
come up with some tentative insights. The minute you
get philosophical about the issue, you're lost in the
postmodern maze.
Rutger
--- Ron T <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yes, there are of course many subtle distinctions
> among different types of
> narrative truths and one can formulate and
> categorize and try to establish
> some control over these slippery designations. One
> finds in the process
> though that there might be many many different types
> of unreliabilities and
> that unreliability is itself difficult to define. Is
> Leni Riefenstahl's
> "Triumph of the Will" reliable narration? The
> narrator apotheosizes Hitler
> and his regime. The German audience might have taken
> all this to be "true,"
> an "accurate" representation of German history, but
> the whole thing is a
> lie. Who then determines whether the narrator is
> reliable? The narrator of
> this documentary is assumed to be telling the truth.
> So, now we might say,
> well, propaganda is a different kind of unreliable
> narration, so that each
> film problematizes the issue in a different way
> until we have thousands of
> categories and subcategories of unreliabilities
> trying to hold each one in a
> neat container while it is slipping out. "Citizen
> Kane" raises this issue
> in its own way, providing different perspectives on
> the same scene. When the
> camera moves up to show to workmen commening on
> Susan Alexander's singing,
> we get a new version of events and thus renders the
> original view of this
> scene unreliable. I think unreliability is a much
> more complex issue than
> simply determining whether the narrator was telling
> the truth or not. I am
> not trying to render the distinctions between
> reliable and unreliable to
> uselessness, but rather to explore some of the
> problems inherent in this
> complex aesthetic issue. Poe's "The Black Cat" is
> a perfect example of an
> unreliable narrator in fiction--but there are no
> facts that counter his
> point of view. We can determine that the narrator is
> unreliable by the
> syntax of his language and by the way he responds to
> events. But what about
> the unreliable spectator or the unreliable reader?
> Can the spectator be
> relied upon to dot the right lines and come to the
> right conlcusions?
>
>
=====
APROPOS - Rutger H. Cornets de Groot
English-Dutch Translation Services
www.xs4all.nl/~cornets
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