13 Delegated Film Narrators When we turn to sound film, it is difficult to grant that the film is only transmitting a story... There still exist, at least by rights, two levels: ne ... is to be found in the image, while the other ... is transmitted by the dialogue. Frangois Jost, Cinémas de la modernité: Films, théories, 26 ‘The arrival of sound recording considerably altered the narrative econ- omy of film. After the frenzy of the century’s early years, ‘silent’ cin- ema had become increasingly ... silent. Although there were many examples of live ‘sound tracks’ throughout the 1920s, films were now usually accompanied only by a piano or orchestra. Dialogue was now normally found only on intertitles, the lecturer having fallen silent long before.! The ‘talkie revolution’ put the human voice back on the agenda, allowing cinema to explore new narrative avenues, particu- larly by resorting to that assistant known as the voice-off narrator, a worthy successor to the early cinema lecturer. Unlike its turn-of-the- century ancestor, this acted-out narrator, because it was incorporated into the film itself, could, moreover, attempt to-’suggest that anyone other than himself is speaking’ (Plato 393a), could attempt to convince everyone, from the mere filmgoer to the narratologist, that it was al- ways the one speaking and telling, throughout the film's chain of events, whatever the means of expression used in any given moment of the discourse. We must, therefore, attempt to grasp this syncretic? phenomenon of the ‘sound and dialogue film narrative’ in its entirety if we are properly to appraise the specificity of each of the various nar- rative levels upon which and with which the film narrator can act. The136 From Plato to Lumigre film narrator: that ‘great image-maker/ or what we have termed the film mega-narrator. While we might view the discourse of the film mega-monstrator (responsible for staging events on film) and of the filmographic nar- rator (responsible for linking them to each other) as being located on a distinct (and subordinate) level from that of the mega-narrator (re- sponsible for their specifically filmic expression), we must ask our- selves how the reappearance of the lecturer in the form of the verbal narrator fits into this system. The verbal narrator, who is more or less (but always to some extent) acted out, offers commentary - conveyed from a greater or lesser distance (the character he or she represents may or may not be a protagonist in the story) and from a more or less fixed point of view (remaining invisible or not) - on the sounds and images telling a story for which this agent itself appears responsible ‘on a narratological level. The first thing we must remark upon is that an agent of this kind can take the form, on both a narratological and a diegetic level, of different narrative systems. It can bé involved in the narrative to varying degrees. It seems to me that this agent’s most radical and important distinguishing features, in this respect, concern the use it may make of the language’s deictics (thus establishing the degree to which it is a speaking agent) and, especially, its propensity to use, in reference to itself, the word ‘I.’ Because while it is true, as Emile Benveniste claims, that the moment speech is anchored by an ‘Ya human experience takes form anew and reveals the linguistic i strument behind it,” the status of any film narrator that manifests it- self verbally must be seen to change entirely according to whether this agent permits itself to proffer one or more ‘I's to designate itself.* Let's take an example: Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes (1987), which had just been released at the time of this book's first edition. This film is quite typical of a narrative with an acted-out narrator (Romano, played by Marcello Mastroianni) whose task is to recount some of his past adventures. On a certain level, the film is quite easy to summarize: a waiter getting on in years who works in the dining room of a cruise ship tells a passenger about his meeting a young Russian woman, with ‘whom he fell in love. That's all. The framework of this narrative, which we would have to describe as ‘primary,’ has a disarming simplicity, and its diegesis is of very short duration: only a few hours at most pass between the time of the obliging passenger's arrival in the dining room and the moment when Romano's boss calls him to order, thereby put- ting a definitive end to the narrative. At a stretch, the camera mightDelegated Film Narrators 137 Figure 13.1 Dark Eyes, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1987 [Still] (Cinémathéque québécoise)