Uvod u teoriju filmske priče | Nikica Gilić

SUMMARY

The theory of narration usually cites Aristotle as its source, although the twentieth-century study of narration is mostly based on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as Russian formalism and the (morphological) study of folktales conducted by Vladimir Propp. These foundations are crucial for the structuralist and semiotic study of narration, and it is in the context of structuralism that the birth of narratology took place. Narratology is a distinctive type of theory of narration, concerned with describing the deep structures common to stories told (transmitted) in all media, with chief contributors R. Barthes, G. Genette, A. J. Greimas, Tz. Todorov, G. Prince, Sh. Rimmon-Kenan and others. In spite of the more aggressive and continually diverging post-structuralist theory, narratology has continued its development, with film and literary narratology of Seymour Chatman as one of the most prominent achievements in recent decades. Needless to say, the historical development of filmology has not followed completely the path of the theory of literature, in spite of the continuous contacts and mutual influences between the two fields. That is the reason why the more recent (post-structuralist and Marxist) tendencies (although not insignificant) have been of less importance and influence in filmology than in literary study. The cognitivist film theory, with David Bordwell as one of the key figures, became the most prominent school in filmology in the 1980s. Marking the advocates of post-structuralist film studies as the proponents of “grand theories”, the cognitivist film theorists based their method on the achievements of cognitive psychology, also relying, however, on the works of Russian formalists and structuralist theory of literature and (to a lesser extent) of film. Although Bordwell jettisons language and linguistics as the basis for studying film narration, one must bear in mind that film quite often mimics the (verbal) communicative situation of narration. So while the cognitivists basically study the ways we perceive the medium of film, the narratologists study the phenomena that take place when the medium mimics the narrative situation: which instances (textual figures) are formed (implied author, narrator, addressee, implied reader, etc.). In this branch of narratology the various types of narration in film are also studied; for example, reliable and unreliable narration, focalised and unfocalised narration, multi-levelled narration, etc. Since these types of theory are evidently complementary, their future contact (with, perhaps, some additional elements imported from the theory of music) might further enrich not only the theory of film, but the history of film as well. Naturally, the synthetic ambition of this approach can never be completely fulfilled, but some sort of synthetic tendency is probably central to every serious theoretical effort.