"And like that, he's gone": Vanishing viewpoints in films' image, language, and sound

Dr Vera Tobin from Case Western Reserve University, USA will speak on 20 November 2020.

Thrillers and mysteries in all media often exploit structures and conventions that offer subjective ambiguity. Passages that are compatible with interpretations in which they seem to be attributable to an omniscient narrator, or to the narrative “itself,” but can also turn out to have been the fallible or dishonest account of a character, provide important opportunities to set up surprise twists while maintaining the informational integrity of the baseline narrative. The relevant conventions around viewpoint in written fictions can be complex and slippery, but they are more straightforward and constrained than their counterparts in film. Filmic viewpoint is rarely as constrained or sustained as its literary counterpart. A novel narrated in the first person, for instance, is typically (with a little bit of wiggle room) truly constrained to the narrator's perspective, but as this talk will show, it is very common for films to use characters’ speech or perspective as a jumping-off point to set up a flashback, or to help viewers stay oriented in space and time between edits, only to abandon the constraints of character viewpoint once the transition has been established. This talk will dive into the conventions surrounding these “vanishing viewpoints” in Hollywood-style narrative films and discuss the challenges they present to unified multimodal accounts of concepts like free indirect discourse, “stance” (in the senses found in Du Bois 2007 and Dancygier 2012), and narrative embedding.