WHAT IS NARRATIVE? 123is told) to shape the viewer’s experience of the nar-
rative (the story itself ).
In every movie, the camera is the primary narra-
tor. Its narration consists of the many visual ele-
ments it captures and arranges in every composition
in every shot. A narrative moment in Alfred Hitch-
cock’s Notorious(1946; screenwriter: Ben Hecht)
offers an easy example. In the previous scene, we
have seen the Nazi conspirator Alexander Sebast-
ian (Claude Rains) discover that his wife, Alicia
(Ingrid Bergman), is a U.S. government spy. Natu-
rally, he tells his mother, and she begins brain-
storming ways to discreetly eliminate his unfaithful
spouse. A shot in the next scene begins focused on
the betrayed husband as he urges his wife to drink
her coffee. The camera drifts down from his smirk-
ing face and across the breakfast table until Alicia’s
coffee cup fills the screen. When she picks it up, the
camera follows it to her lips. As Alicia begins to
drink, the camera moves over to feature her
scheming mother-in-law contentedly stitching her
needlepoint. The next shot shows Alicia rubbing
her forehead and looking decidedly under the
weather. Throughout the sequence, the camera nar-
ratortells us that Alicia’s coffee is poisoned by
selecting what we see and shaping when and how
we see it. In other words, the camera tells the story.
And, of course, other cinematic elements con-
tribute to the narration. The lighting, set design,
makeup, and performances in each shot, as well as
the associations achieved through the juxtaposition
of images, all contribute to our engagement with
the narrative. Maybe it would be more accurate to
state that in every movie, the filmmakers and their
creative techniques constitute the primary narra-
tor. Nonetheless, it is a little more streamlined to
think of all that as “the camera”.
And “the camera” isn’t always a movie’s only
narrator. Some movies use more than one narrator
to deliver the narration. This narration can be in
the form of a character’sparticular perspective on
the narrative’s events.
A first-personnarrator is a character in the
narrative who typically imparts information in the
form of voice-overnarration, which is when we
hear a character’s voice overthe picture without
actually seeing the character speak the words. This
technique of a character speaking to the audience
allows us to hearone narration—from the first-
person character narrator—while simultaneously
watchingthe narration provided by our narrator
camera.
The combination of these narrator partners
may be relatively straightforward, such as in Danny
Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996; screenwriter: John
Hodge), when the first-person voice-over primer
to heroin addiction delivered by Renton (Ewan
McGregor) plays over the opening sequences depict-
ing the lives of the addicts that populate the story.
A richer, more complex experience of the narra-
tive is possible when the first-person narration con-
trasts somehow with what we see on-screen. The
first-person narrators of writer/director Terrence
Malick’s first two films (Badlands, 1973, and Days of
Heaven, 1978) are naive and sometimes deluded
young women who attempt to rationalize and even
romanticize events and actions we can see for our-
selves. The conflict between what the camera is
telling us and the perspective provided by the first-
person narrator can expand our relationship with
the narrative beyond anything a camera alone can
deliver.
And some movies push this relationship even
further. These films don’t limit the first-person nar-
rative to voice-over narration. Instead, the first-
person narrator character interrupts the narrative
to deliver direct-addressnarration directly to the
audience, thus breaking the “fourth wall” that tra-
ditionally separates the viewer from the two-
dimensional fiction on-screen.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986; director/
screenwriter: John Hughes) features a charismatic
slacker who seduces his fellow characters as well as
his audience. Ferris (Matthew Broderick) fre-
quently pauses the on-screen action to gaze into our
eyes and charm us with his own personal take on
the story he inhabits. Ferris Bueller follows in the
footsteps of other smooth-talking scoundrels who
break the fourth wall, most notably Tony Richard-
son’s Tom Jones(1963; screenwriter: John Osborne)
and Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie(1966; screenwriter: Bill
Naughton). Other direct-address narration is more
confrontational. Michel Haneke’s Funny Games
(2007; screenwriter: Haneke) challenges the viewer