Wow Bernd, I feel like a child on christmas morning! 


I would agree as long as the dream is only marked as a dream afterwards. 
how obvious - a temporal qualification! I have been frustrated, challenged and 
beguiled by this thread with something nagging at my appreciation and 
thwarting my comprehension. I was beginning to suspect that it was just me 
and then- 5,000 christmas presents all at once! I feel like I've been trying to 
remember my own name for a week and you walked up and showed me my 
name tag! Bernd - lunch is on me. : )

"I'd say that there are types of unreliable narration that don't work an infinite 
number of times... I get really suspicious when the main character has an 
accident or is shot early in a film and seems to survive and experience strange 
things afterwards."

Well see this idea fascinates me. What you are saying depends on who you 
are and what you have seen and even then, I would contest whether or not 
the actual narative strategy is still successful; after all, you are only guessing.
'I'd substitute realism with a term like "a stable diegetic reality". '
Crystal clear. 

'I assume that the typewriter refers to JAGGED EDGE'

yessum.

"The final revelation is a product of lacking knowledgeability as opposed to 
lacking comunicativeness."

you really are Santa. 

"it is still unusual that such a lie is supported by images.
Do you have any particular movie in mind, Brooke?"

Well not really, but in my experience the thriller and courtroom genres tend to 
often use grainy, blurry, over-exposed, desaturated whip-panning jump cut 
montages as flashbacks/re-enactments in visual support of testimony or 
account; obvious examples would be films like "A Few Good Men" or "Gone, 
Baby Gone".

"I'm not sure what to make of those [horror] movies yet. At least I don't have 
any kind of "rule" on how to judge them. But I definitely wouldn't rule them out 
entirely."

nor do I. I was thinking of the Elm Street cycle of films and how dreams co-
author reality and vice versa and then there are also just plain old dreams in 
the mix too, the MacGuffin nightmares which are only dreams with no real 
consequences.
  
"I would say no: time travel means that there is a diegetic world and later 
that world is changed - often quite fundamentally - through diegetic actions. 
Even though the first diegetic world doesn't exist anymore in the end, it did 
actually exist as the diegetic reality at one point during the movie."

Bordwell insists these devices are unreliable. Ican't decide. I find it is hard to 
jugde as there is no obvious difference between the differing negated realities 
of a Malcolm, Hermione Granger, John Connor, Superman or the Sullivan 
brothers in "Frequency"just to think of a few. Often these narratives don't 
offer the possibility of time travel before the event itself. I cried when Lois 
Lane died and even more so when Superman travelled back in time to save 
her, the filmmaker sure got me - big time!

"Unreliable narration in that context would mean that it turns out the first 
diegetic reality doesn't exist and has never existed as an actual diegetic 
reality at any point during the movie."

Then how do you still allow 'the 6th Sense'? All of those events we witnessed 
still took place in a diegetic reality, didn't Malcolm just see them differently?

"Movies like WAYNE'S WORLD seem closer to unreliability to me. Here there is 
no mention of time travel or anything like that, but all of a sudden the main 
characters "take back" one ending and replace it with another. There is no 
actual diegetic action that explains why or how they can do this. They 
just "step out of the diegetic world" and reenter it at an earlier point in time."

An earlier film "Cluedo" does this, but several times. The film ends, the credits 
roll and then everything stops and an alternative ending runs. After the 
second one you know there will be a third (and there is) and so it seems that 
the initial instance is unreliable but the subsequent instances of exactly the 
same device within the same film are not. Very trixy. Don't you just love 
cinema?

Again i can't thank you enough for your wonderful post,

Weihnachtsgrüße!

Brooke 

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