lots of people have been interrogating the narration/diegesis distinction by citing a variety of exceptional or slippery cases, or by referring to the work of "authors" whose aim was precisely to undermine this utterly conventional distinction, a distinction anchored in a way of reading linguistic signs rather than in anything "real" but the fact that boundary cases pose problems doesn't invalidate the distinction itself, so long as we understand its limits and its conventionality SO . . . to establish ground zero fir the distinction: imagine an actor on a stage in a play delivering a soliloquy . . . and imagine that this performance is being filmed by two different cameras located in two different positions, one much nearer the actor than the other . . . and imagine too that, in editing the filmed version of this performance the director/editor decides at a particular point to switch from a long shot taken by one camera ["A"] to a close up taken by the other [camera "B"] now, in watching the film we see an actor delivering a soliloquy, and we are invited [urged, manipulated?] to see the actor as portraying a character who is having a specific human experience expressed in words . . . but, as we watch and see the cut from camera A to camera B, we suddenly see a close up of the actor's face and discern facial expressions previously unavailable to us -- and that this results in a different understanding of the character than we would have had from the long shot i think we can reasonably say, at this point, that something has happened in the film, or to the film, or to us in watching the film, but that nothing at all has happened to the character in the film who is simply continuing to express herself, or even to the actor who may have had no idea, while performing the part, of which camera was filing her there is then an important change in OUR experience of the scene, while there has been no change in what we understand to be the scene we are experiencing . . . this is an important difference, and the distinction between narration and diegesis allows us a ready way to talk about it that this distinction can be destroyed or deconstructred by filmmakers as different as godard and mel brooks doesn't make it meaningless mike -- * * Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon. After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to. To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon. **