Chatman, Seymour. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” 1980. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 435-451.

One of the most important observations to come out of narratology is that narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium. In other words, narrative is basically a kind of text organization, and that organization, that schema, needs to be actualized. 435

A salient property of narrative is double time structuring. That is, all narratives, in whatever medium, combine the time sequence of plot events, the time of the histoire (“story-time”) with the time of the presentation of those events in the text, which we call “discourse-time.” 436

Now of course all texts pass through time: it takes x number of hours to read an essay, a legal brief, or a sermon. But the internal structures of these non-narrative texts are not temporal but logical, so that their discourse-time is irrelevant, just as the viewing time of a painting is irrelevant. We may spend half an hour in front of a Titian, but the aesthetic effect is as if we were taking in the whole painting at a glance. In narratives, on the other hand, the dual time orders function independently. 436

Many features of these narratives could be chosen for comparison, but I will limit myself to only two: description and point of view. 436

Notice, incidentally, the disparity between the story order and discourse order: story order is A,B,C, D; discourse order is A,C,B,D. 437

But unlike those arts, unlike painting or sculpture, narrative films do not usually allow us time to dwell on plenteous details. Pressure from the narrative component is too great. Events move too fast. The contemplation of beautiful framing or color or lighting is a pleasure limited to those who can see the film many times or who are fortunate enough to have access to equipment which will allow them to stop the frame. 439

Indeed, there are movies (like Terence Malick’s recent Days of Heaven) which are criticized because their visual effects are too striking for the narrative line to support. 439

For example, there is a film which presents a sequence of frozen frames, on the basis of which the audience is prompted to construct a story. Then, after the last frame, the camera pulls away to reveal that the frames were all merely part of a collage of photographs organized randomly. This last shot “denarratives” the film. 439

When I say, “The cart was tiny; it came onto the bridge,” I am asserting that certain property of the cart of being small in size and that certain relation of arriving at the bridge. However, when I say “The green cart came onto the bridge,” I am asserting nothing more than its arrival at the bridge; the greenness of the cart is not asserted but slipped in without syntactic fuss. It is only named. Textually, it emerges by the way. Now, most film narratives seem to be of the latter textual order: it requires special effort for films to assert a property or relation. The dominant mode is presentational, not assertive. A film doesn’t say, “This is the state of affairs,” it merely shows you that state of affairs. 440

Filmmakers and critics traditionally show disdain for verbal commentary because it explicates what, they feel, should be implicated visually. 440

In Psycho, the camera starts high above Phoenix, then glides down into a room where a couple are making love. It is true that both of these shots are in a certain sense descriptive or at least evocative of a place; but they seem to enjoy the status only because they occur at the very beginning of the films, that is to say, before any characters have been introduced. Now narrative in its usual definition is a causal chain of events, and since “narrative event” means an “action performed by or at least of some relevance to a character,” we can see why precisely the absence of characters endows establishing shots with a descriptive quality. It is not that story-time has been arrested. It is just that it has not yet begun. 441

Again the author’s task is easier: correct attribution can be insured by simply naming the attribute. The filmmaker, on the other hand, has to depend on the audience’s agreement to the justice of the visual clues. 442

The fact that most novels and short stories come to us through the voice of a narrator gives authors a greater range and flexibility than filmmakers. For one thing, the visual point of a view in a film is always there: it is fixed and determinate precisely because the camera always needs to be placed somewhere. But in verbal fiction, the narrator may or may not give us a visual bearing. He may let us peer over a character’s shoulder, or he may represent something from a generalized perspective, commenting indifferently on the front, sides, and back of the object, disregarding how it is possible to see all these parts in the same glance. He doesn’t have to account for his physical position at all. Further, he can enter solid bodies and tell what things are like inside, and so on. In the present case, Maupassant’s narrator gives us a largely frontal view of Henriette on the swing, but he also casually makes observations about her posterior. And, of course, he could as easily have described the secret contents of her heart. The filmmaker, with his bulky camera, lights, tracks, and other machinery, suffers restrictions. 444

There follows a shot of Henriette’s joyous face. The shot is from below, and it wonderfully communicates her lightheartedness and euphoria at being aloft. Suddenly we are very much identified with Henriette’s feelings: Rodophe’s voyeurism is forgotten. This identification also entails “point of view” but now in a transferred or even metaphorical sense of the term: it is not Henriette’s perceptual point of view that the camera identifies with, since she is looking toward it. Rather, her movements and the infectious joy on her face incite us to share her emotional point of view; we empathize with her. For this effect I offer the term “interest” point of view. We become identified with the fate of a character, and even if we don’t see things or even think about them from his or her literal perspective, it still makes sense to say that we share the character’s point of view. 445

Two points of view can exist concurrently in a single shot. It is an interesting property of cinematic narrative that we can see through one character’s eyes and feel through another’s heart. The camera adopts a position, an angle, and a distance which by convention associates itself with the position, angle, and distance of a character’s vision. But so great is its capacity to inspire identification with characters’ thinking, feeling, and general situation that we tend to identify even when the character appears to us in a completely frontal view. This sympathetic or “interest” point of view (as I call it) is particularly strong in film narratives and can easily combine with the more conventionally marked perceptual point of view. 451, n.