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

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