Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film by Christian Metz

Author:Christian Metz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART057000, Art/Film & Video, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

*. Which translates as “Films in the First Person and the Illusion of Reality in Cinema.”—Trans.

†. The original sentence reads “Le cinéma, c’est ce qui est autour”; Metz is presumably referring to the similarity between autour, meaning “around,” and auteur.—Trans.

‡. Literally, “the barge passing by.”—Trans.

11

THE ORIENTED OBJECTIVE SYSTEM

Enunciation and Style

There was a time when films were replete with “punctuation marks.” This has long been something that interests me.1 Fades to black, dissolves, wipes, and so on came to signal the articulation of the story, implicitly opposing themselves to the simple cut that marked the straightforward succession of shots within a coherent narrative unit. Moreover, it was this play of demarcations that to an extent created the narrative units themselves.

Optical effects of this kind are still sometimes used today, and Francis Vanoye has written on them briefly but with great clarity.2 They are not attributed to a character who might “see” or “imagine” them. They are not subjective. They evidently come from the enunciative source [foyer énonciative] itself, and it is via them that “the film” speaks to the spectator (Béla Balázs remarked on this).3 They speak directly because they are not diegetic either (see Soriau).4 When an iris tremblingly recloses around the face of Lillian Gish, nobody doubts that the black halo belongs to a different register of representation than the heavenly and eternally astonished visage of the young girl. It does not belong to the story being told, which has nothing to do with the black circle, but in fact to the narration, which, located above the plot, is signaling the end of an episode to the spectator. This kind of notification becomes even more striking when the punctuation mark is fantastical or totally new. An example is in Jean Renoir’s Les bas-fonds (1936), where several fades to black are brought in vertically, so the black “falls” from the top of the screen to the bottom, with the horizontal line between them slowly lowering itself. (This fake fade is in reality a wipe but not a true wipe as it is not lateral, rather a pseudo-curtain…).

Punctuation marks are the purest examples of an enunciative system that we come across elsewhere: nonneutral images that clearly manifest an intrusion, or at least an intervention, but an intervention that, because it comes “from on high” and not from a character, is compatible with an objective status that paradoxically it can even reinforce. What we have here is a fiction that is foundational in fiction (and not just in cinema), whereby the primary level of enunciation does the job of reference point and so of an “objective” marker (Robert Burgoyne has made the same point in different terms).5

For Francesco Casetti images like this define one of the four cardinal positions of filmic enunciation, which he calls the “impossible objective” [objectif irréel] position.6 It is a good expression, and it is fundamentally precise because everything that is separate from the diegesis separates itself by this means from the “real” that is established by the narrative pact.

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