When we think of diegesis and diegetic in film studies, we know what the words refer to within the confines of the traditional scholarly definition of film in the 20th and 21st centuries. This understanding comes from a certain ontological common sense that narratologically film has a dual nature that consists of mimesis and diegesis. Thinking about narration through images and sound, as opposed to the live-acted or read drama or epos in the times of Plato and Aristotle, (...) has given birth to a synthetic view of the poet’s voice and the characters. In fiction films, mimesis and diegesis are so symbiotic that it is often difficult to distinguish between them. However, is it possible to think of films that are non-mimetic? In other words: is it possible for a film to be completely diegetic in the sense of Plato’s understanding of the word diegesis? Plato was against mimetic arts because they were so far removed from the eidos of what they were that there was no explicable use in presenting them. On the other hand, he very much approved or at least perhaps tolerated and recognized the importance of non-mimetic art forms such as music with specific modes of harmony or poetry that only contained the poet’s words where no characters were represented. With this view in mind, two steps will be taken in this paper: the first is questioning the possibility of a purely diegetic film, and the second is the significance of inquiring about such a work. (shrink)

The main objective of my article is to investigate the ways in which contemporary Anglophone drama and theatre actively employ diegetic and narrative forms, setting them in conflict with the mimetic action. The mode of telling seems to be at odds with the conviction not only about the mimetic nature of performance and theatre but also about the growing visuality of contemporary theatre. Many contemporary performances and dramatic texts expose the tensions between the reduction of visual representations and the expansion (...) of the narrative space. This space offers various possibilities of exploring the distance between the performers and spectators, tensions between narrative time and place and the present time of performance, the real and the imagined/inauthentic/fake, traumatic memory and imagination. The active foregrounding of the diegetic elements of performance will be exemplified with reference to several contemporary plays and performances: my focus will be on the uses of epic forms in what can be called post-epic theatre, illustrated by Kieran Hurley’s Rantin ; the foregrounding of the diegetic and the undecidability of the fictional and the real, instantiated by Forced Entertainment’s performances and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman ; and the narrative density and traumatic aporia of Pornography by Simon Stephens. (shrink)

Nos proponemos indagar y delimitar, un período determinado de producción fílmica de Raúl Ruiz, realizada en Chile durante la década recién pasada. Ruiz instalará un tipo de narración fílmica inspirado en el rescate de algunos cuentos populares, y de una cierta literatura chilena de fines del siglo xix y principios del xx. Si a mediados de los años 90, en su primera Poética del cine, insistió en resistir al modelo impuesto por el cine industrial, de que la narración determina a (...) la imagen, con esta serie de films que trabajaremos, dará cuenta de una singular manera de narración en que la imagen se convierte en un principio determinante. Es así, que la narración que promoverá Ruiz, es una búsqueda de los restos o vestigios de experiencias que no forman parte de ningún tipo de Historia nacional de carácter monumental, ya que pueden ser transmitidos no desde una imagen relatada del pasado, sino que a partir de su transmisión deviene una imagen permanente pero inactual. Esta imagen es nuestro objetivo, ya que es una construcción de un tipo de narración singular que posee un vínculo indisociable a una relación temática y estética con Chile. (shrink)

El presente artículo examina la semántica de la anagnórisis en la diégesis de Tucídides y los poetas trágicos. Vinculando el corpus narrativo de la tragedia griega y de la stásis en la democracia de la Grecia Clásica, el texto formula dos ejercicios: Primero, mediante el examen de algunas especies lexicales que constituyen el campo semántico de la tragedia (hamartía, amatía y katastrophé), se establece el nexo entre «lance patético» y anagnórisis que acontecen al héroe trágico y al ciudadano ateniense narrado (...) por Tucídides. Segundo, mediante la indagación de los lexemas enunciados en la anagnórisis del héroe trágico y del ciudadano ateniense, con la noción de «sintagma trágico» el artículo imbrica el campo semántico de la diégesis trágica e historiográfica para postular la conjunción de una lengua trágico-política en común. (shrink)

O trabalho propõe uma reflexão especulativa sobre a narrativa literária como subsistema autopoiético social, como extensão do conceito teórico de Niklas Luhmann de autopoiese (autopoiesis), aplicado nas ciências sociais. Nossa hipótese especula como a narrativa literária pode ser descrita como uma forma de comunicação social e de “observação de segunda ordem” (observação da observação). No entanto, a narrativa literária se distingue da narrativa social como uma “auto-observação” narrativa ou narrativa da narrativa. O que interessa à narrativa literária não é a (...) descrição de fatos, ações ou personagens, mas as relações de níveis narrativos no momento de sua autorreprodução. Com isso, será proposto um cruzamento entre a Teoria dos Sistemas Sociais de Luhmann com a Teoria da Narratologia, em particular como apresentada na obra de Gerard Genette. Assim, a diferença entre o nível narrativo (diegesis) e o nível de focalização da história corresponde à diferença entre observação de segunda e de primeira ordens. Será visto que a resolução dos paradoxos surgidos na circularidade da auto-observação do sistema literário é realizada pela formação de “cronotopos”, conceito da obra de Mikhail Bakhtin, isto é, como uma extensão no tempo e no espaço do domínio do imaginário. (shrink)

Una serie de avisos televisivos que el Frente de Todos difundió en las elecciones bonaerenses de 2019 introdujo un elemento sobre la banda de imagen que concitó cierta atención en los medios de prensa. Se trata de un automóvil con el cual el líder del binomio, Axel Kicillof, recorrió el interior de la Provincia de Buenos Aires con el objeto de que el espacio político que representaba recuperase el gobierno de dicho territorio, tras un período de cuatro años administrado por (...) la coalición Cambiemos. En nuestro estudio creemos oportuno examinar, a partir de aquel vehículo y otros operadores de superficie, la diégesis que atravesó los anuncios que podríamos denominar Llegando, debido a que los elementos, espacios y situaciones que los conforman revelan un sentido connotado más amplio que el encuentro entre los candidatos y los electores. La metodología consistió en la realización de un corpus de unidades de observación, de acuerdo a la dimensión argumental que las unifica y a los espacios referenciales en los cuales acontece la trama de los spots. El impacto que se espera obtener consiste en un estudio de la banda de imagen de los avisos, debido a que los dispositivos técnicos de propaganda concernientes a la política partidaria electoral constituyen muestras pertinentes para examinar un aspecto sustancial de la cultura visual contemporánea. (shrink)

This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure. A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was (...) considered to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-modern and modern periods. Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting as an ambigous aesthetic ideal offered by early modern theory of art. It embodies the idea of an image identical to what it represents. It is interpreted in terms of perceptual and aesthetic illusion, mimesis, diegesis, play, irony and scientific illustration.

The hymns of Callimachus are generally divided into two groups: the ‘mimetic’ hymns , which seem to be enactments of ritual scenes, and the ‘nonmimetic’ hymns , which seem to follow the pattern of the Homeric hymns. Occasionally this distinction has been challenged, for instance by pointing to an' element of mimesis in H. 1, but on the whole the division into two groups has been 1 adhered to rather rigidly. A drawback of this distinction is that it seems to (...) prevent further insight into an important aspect of Callimachus' poetic technique. I think that there is in fact a subtle play with various aspects of diegesis and mimesis which pervades the whole collection of hymns and gives it a certain unity, because it draws attention to the way in which narratives or descriptions are presented in the hymns. Although the emphasis on mimesis or diegesis may vary, none of the hymns can be regarded as diegetic in all its aspects and there is a great deal of fluctuation between, the two modes of presentation both within the collection and within the individual hymns. (shrink)

Long-running horror series are reputed to yield diminishing returns (both in terms of profit and quality). At first glance, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series appears to fit that established pattern. For instance, lead antagonist Freddy supposedly ‘deteriorates’ from sinister, backlit child molester to comic-book ‘Las Vegas lounge’ stand-up act by the end of the 1980s (Schoell and Spencer 1992, 116). However, interviews from the period indicate that comedy was a central component from the outset of the series; it (...) is not, as has been often suggested, that the series’ horror was diluted by the introduction of humour in later sequels. Such misremembrances are entrenched by the writers’, directors’ and actors’ retrospective reflections on Elm Street, which colour how the series is understood more broadly. This chapter will focus on one of the most common misremembrances embedded into Elm Street’s lore; that the series began with hard rules about the relationship between dream and reality, which became looser (to the point of incoherence) as the series progressed. As close textual analysis and examination of archival interviews will demonstrate, the series’ “rules” were never as clearly established as creator Wes Craven intended. Moreover, rather than complaining that the continuing story did not hold together—indeed, Craven dismissed parts 2-6 of the series on these grounds—I argue that the series ought to be taken on its own terms. The individual films may vary in aesthetic and quality for various industrial reasons, but they are nevertheless chapters in a continuing narrative, and ought to be understood as such. Given that the diegesis is based on shared experiences—secrets held by Springwood’s parents, nightmares and abilities shared by the teens—it is reductive to understand the Elm Street films as anything other than an imbricated whole. As such, this chapter will demonstrate that the series’ narrative is best understood as a recurring nightmare. Its logic is dreamlike, being constituted by events, characters and motifs that are echoed across the series. Thus, this chapter contends that to dismiss the Elm Street sequels as a product of diminishing returns is to overlook the series’ narrative richness. More broadly, this chapter makes a case for understanding sequels as valuable parts of a whole, rather than dismissing them as inferior copies of the original. (shrink)

Die Schrift ist im Film nicht nur durch Schriftobjekte (z. B. Briefe, Leuchtreklamen, Zeitungen) präsent, die der Diegese angehören. In Vor- und Abspann oder Zwischentitel hat sie vor allem im Stummfilm, aber auch in der Ära des Tonfilms ihren eigenen Raum. Von dort dringt sie bisweilen in den physikalischen Raum des Films ein, mitunter erscheint der Raum des Vorspanns etc. als 〉wirklicher〈 Raum. Interessant sind jene Fälle, in denen Buchstaben und Wörter ihrerseits den Gesetzen des physikalischen Raums, Bewegung und Schwerkraft (...) unterworfen zu sein scheinen. Dies führt zu Interferenzen und Paradoxien zwischen zwei inkompatiblen Logiken. German Writing is not only present in film through objects that belong to the diegesis (e.g. letters, neon signs, newspapers). In opening and closing credits as well as in intertitles, writing claims its own space – especially in silent movies, but also in the era of talkies. From there, it sometimes penetrates into the physical space of the film; at times the space of the opening credits appears as 〉real〈 space. Especially interesting are those cases in which letters and words seem to be themselves subjected to the laws of physical space, motion and gravity. This leads to interferences and paradoxes between two incompatible logics. (shrink)

Die Schrift ist im Film nicht nur durch Schriftobjekte (z. B. Briefe, Leuchtreklamen, Zeitungen) präsent, die der Diegese angehören. In Vor- und Abspann oder Zwischentitel hat sie vor allem im Stummfilm, aber auch in der Ära des Tonfilms ihren eigenen Raum. Von dort dringt sie bisweilen in den physikalischen Raum des Films ein, mitunter erscheint der Raum des Vorspanns etc. als 〉wirklicher〈 Raum. Interessant sind jene Fälle, in denen Buchstaben und Wörter ihrerseits den Gesetzen des physikalischen Raums, Bewegung und Schwerkraft (...) unterworfen zu sein scheinen. Dies führt zu Interferenzen und Paradoxien zwischen zwei inkompatiblen Logiken. Writing is not only present in film through objects that belong to the diegesis (e.g. letters, neon signs, newspapers). In opening and closing credits as well as in intertitles, writing claims its own space – especially in silent movies, but also in the era of talkies. From there, it sometimes penetrates into the physical space of the film; at times the space of the opening credits appears as 〉real〈 space. Especially interesting are those cases in which letters and words seem to be themselves subjected to the laws of physical space, motion and gravity. This leads to interferences and paradoxes between two incompatible logics. (shrink)

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as emotional (...) experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy of experience that accounts for alternative sensoria of time, similar to the traumatic encounter. The cinematic aevum is equally not of the material, corporeal world; concurrently associating human reality with the myths of the human condition. To say that a cinematic aevum exists following traumatic scenes, is to specify a visual “time-fiction” in film, to recognise a spatial form that belongs neither to the finite time of the film's narrative, or of the “eternal” time outside the film's diegesis, but participates in the order (and linking) of both. Wilfred Bion's psychoanalytic works are used to discuss the traumatic symptom of “empty time”: the inability to recollect, to make links between memory and experience, demonstrating a version of empty time that works as an external violence to spectator perception. Bion's theories offer fresh psychoanalytic perspective on trauma and its relationship to time by challenging classical ways of thinking about inner and outer perception. (shrink)

The hymns of Callimachus are generally divided into two groups: the ‘mimetic’ hymns, which seem to be enactments of ritual scenes, and the ‘nonmimetic’ hymns, which seem to follow the pattern of the Homeric hymns. Occasionally this distinction has been challenged, for instance by pointing to an' element of mimesis inH. 1, but on the whole the division into two groups has been 1 adhered to rather rigidly. A drawback of this distinction is that it seems to prevent further insight (...) into an important aspect of Callimachus' poetic technique. I think that there is in fact a subtle play with various aspects of diegesis and mimesis which pervades the whole collection of hymns and gives it a certain unity, because it draws attention to the way in which narratives or descriptions are presented in the hymns. Although the emphasis on mimesis or diegesis may vary, none of the hymns can be regarded as diegetic in all its aspects and there is a great deal of fluctuation between, the two modes of presentation both within the collection and within the individual hymns. (shrink)

Enacting the World of Cinema offers a substantial reconfiguration of the textual roots of modern film narratology. By giving sustained attention to cinema's material-affective modes of communicating its stories and embedding its audience in atmospheric, kinetic, and multisensorial worlds, this book maintains that film narratives are less representations than they are enactments; brought forth through the interactions of the felt body and the film material. The book defends this enactive and media-anthropological thesis by reworking a series of established film narratological (...) key concepts including the diegesis, mood/atmosphere, and the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. In the process, this book draws on a wide range of contemporary theoretical resources such as affective neuroscience, media-philosophy, philosophy of mind, atmosphere research, multisensory perception theory, as well as a broad selection of films including Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttman, 1927), The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957), and Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018)"--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

This paper aims at a semio-epistemological revisit of Peircean/Bazinian indexicality. On the level of diegesis, an image takes on indexicality as physical causality, the succession of causes and effects. What matters in our cinematic experience is then less medium-specificity than reference-recognition, i.e. whether or not we know what a visual sign refers to within diegesis. The problematic case is that in which an image is not a clear index to something visually given, but it appears and functions like (...) a “para-index” that only partially, impossibly indicates the unthinkable, a sort of “digit” that fingers what Lacan or Deleuze calls the absent but immanent Real or Virtual. In fact Bazin’s interest in adventure films facing this unrepresentable realm especially inspires us to revamp indexicality as para-indexicality. The paper elaborates on this notion through George Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière, as well as films by Michael Haneke, Ingrid Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard etc. (shrink)

This article examines questions of trust in cinema through the lens of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). With its self-referential allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera, a stage-managed fantasy embedded within its plot and image of a dark lighthouse, Shutter Island explores its spectators' and its own cinematic sense of suspicion. The plot revolves around a protagonist who has locked himself out of certain memories and into a fantasy world. The article links pathological and therapeutic aspects of trust (...) with interpersonal and institutional trust issues in ways that blur distinctions between trusting others and trusting oneself, and shows how reliant each is on the other. Construing trust as a type of participant attitude and highlighting techniques used to render it cinematically, the article tracks its emergence and erosion, both in terms of the diegesis and its bearing on film spectatorship. As a post-classical commentary on film-making, Shutter Island is viewed as intricately exemplifying what Robert Sinnerbrink (2016) describes as an action-driven film with “a highly reflective consciousness of cinematic spectatorship” (p. 70), as well as what Thomas Elsaesser (2009) describes as a “mind-game film”. To make sense of its ending, which may strike viewers as baffling and unnerving, and show how the protagonist's seemingly irrational decision is part of its film-philosophical point, traumatic disturbances in subjectivity and “monstrosities” depicted in the film are linked to Jean Epstein's notion of “something monstrous” in cinematic imagery. The protagonist's deliberately chosen fate is interpreted as a reparative gesture, expressing a desire for psychological healing and a way of helping him to marshal and recover a semblance of moral order and integrity under demoralizing circumstances. (shrink)

The concept of suture has long been an important and controversial concept in investigations of the relationships between narrative, diegesis, character, and spectator. The dominant understanding of suture has paid more attention to its Lacanian derivation – and to the account given by Daniel Dayan – than to the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart which first introduced suture into Film Studies. This article, however, follows the recent work of George Butte, who argues that the way Oudart understands suture is very (...) illuminating for the study of the complex forms of intersubjectivity that cinema so readily, and so richly, dramatises – famously by means of shot/reverse shot figures. It argues that certain key moments in Ridley Scott's Alien activate ideas of corporeality, desire, and intersubjectivity in ways that contribute to a wider thematic and figurative nexus at work in the film directed at the exploration of impossible intersubjectivities. The article also proposes that, via this nexus, the film offers an intriguing instantiation of Nietzsche's notion of the “human, all too human”, thereby demonstrating that there is much more in Nietzsche of relevance to Alien than the xenomorph's superhuman “will-to-power”. The android Ash's admiration for the alien's lack both of conscience and consciousness ironically indicates his own all-too-human recognition of the superfluity but inescapability of his own consciousness. The article concludes by drawing briefly on the work of Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, proposing that much of the horror of Alien lies not only in how bodies are ruptured but in the fact that some subjectivities cannot even be sutured. (shrink)

Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike (...) appearances. In the opposite case, the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it: here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained, the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total. Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema, is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma, Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification au cinéma . Francoise Meltzer [the translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is published in Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

Detection in contemporary genre films is in the process of being transformed: viewers see less and less of moving, traveling, and active human bodies entering in interaction and exchanging words. Instead, what takes up a significant part of film time is the view of computer screens, with digitally stored and retrieved traces, meaningful for detection, playing the lead role. One result of this type of detection on screen – rather than detection in the streets or on murder scenes – is (...) that detection is presented as a process happening on the human-computer interface. With reference to Lev Manovich the article asks how the “illusion of navigating through virtual spaces” is recreated, when the context of such an illusion is filmic diegesis defined by genre rules, where “the virtual spaces of the screen” should have a direct effect on “the real spaces of filmic diegesis”? (shrink)

What makes video games unique as an audiovisual medium is not just that they are interactive, but that this interactivity is rule bound and goal oriented. This means that player experience, including experience of the music, is somehow shaped or structured by these characteristics. Because of its emphasis on action in perception, James Gibson’s ecological approach to psychology—particularly his concept of affordances—is well suited to theorise the role of music in player experience. In a game, players perceive the environment and (...) gameplay situations in terms of the goal-oriented actions they afford. Nondiegetic music, not tied to any place in the digital game world, can play a unique role in the structuring of these affordances. Through a series of case studies, I will show that music creates and structures situations both in the game environment (such as the appearance of enemies in Unreal) and beyond the game environment (such as the death of an avatar and the restart of a level in Super Mario Bros.). (shrink)

Al amparo de una observación del fresco de Rafael Sanzio titulado la Stanza della Segnatura, se procura adelantar en el texto una reflexión sobre la práctica del diálogo entre los griegos de la antigüedad. Dicha reflexión pasa por un prurito de caracterización del género conocido con el nombre de "diálogo socrático". La conclusión a la que se llega no por ser conocida es irrelevante: un diálogo, en rigor, nunca termina. Al final se establece una serie de correspondencias entre la significación (...) del acto de contemplación o el acto de recepción en aquel sujeto que, a distancia del tiempo y el espacio griegos, obra como observador o lector de una obra humana. (shrink)

That the same story can be told in different media is one of the fundamental claims of narratology. Claude Bremond famously listed verbal narrative, novels, theater, movies and ballet among potential vehicles for story. He thus prepared the ground for narratology’s future as a discipline engaged in narrative research across media, in principle including single still pictures. However, narratological research concerned with pictorial narrativity generally proceeds from the assumption that although single pictures may evoke or imply stories, they are unsuitable (...) for storytelling in a strict narratological sense. Focusing on the key issue of temporality, this essay will show that a single still picture may indeed tell “a story proper” and can thus be regarded as a narrative, even according to a narrow definition. (shrink)