NARRATIVE IN CINEMA
The idea for this research starts from an experience. The one everyone has after a movie ended. The feeling of continuation. You have just watched a narration that employed images and sounds along time. A very precise time. But that contains another kind of time that with Deluze’s words we could call duration. Doing a methafor where instead of time we have space we can say that: if for example I have a field, so a given space, and I build a house in a given spot of this given space, the ideantity of the spot changes. Is not anymore a field but instead a house. But yet is integrated in the big set that is the field. How does a movie integrate in the given time that is our life? How does it change the identity of it? If we consider our life as a big set -in the matematical way- with his big narrative we can say that the movie is a small set with his own narrative and time perception and his internal rules. Is a closed sistem with his coherence. And that gives a subjective perception of reality that can be in disagreement dissonance with our actaul current life or simply different. And this is where my question borns. What often motivates a director in making a movie is to be able to give an experience through his characters or the camera or something else’s eyes. By camera movements, choices in the rithm of editing, characters character, thoughts, way of talking and behaving, ways of narration, we get infinite different impressions and the movie impacts us in a different way. How does this little Narrative affect the big Narrative? How is the big set influenced by the small? How is our life affected or inspired by a movie. Our behavior is strongly influenced by movies. If most of european population talks american english rather than british is probably bc of the majority of american movies over british ones in popular culture. And you can always guess what kind of cartoons a kid watches because of his behavior that generally mimics what he saw and experienced in the movie. And also decisions big or small are affected by narrative we are used to look at. Before movies were probably tales that had the same function. And before the eroical antologies like Omer’s ones. Alexander Magno was grown reading that and he probably thought about it when taking decisions for his people and conquering places. Is the need of movies maybe an inheritance of the need of Catarsi that pushed us to produce tragedies and stories?
Of course for the creator of a movie the approach is different.
Tarkowsky’s movies have a strong inspiring effect, putting you probably close to tarkowskys own experience. As he says: ‘I cant draw a line between films and my life, the films are part of my life’ says Tarkowsky in an interview. And he continues ‘filming for me isn’t a job is my life and every film is a fundamental act’. And this is a very interesting case where filming is part of this big set and is kind of a continuations of it. But yet is not for the viewer, who creates kind of a separate space for it.
Now i want to specify two things: what Deleuze means with Duration and what i mean in this specific contecxt with Narrative.
He refeirs to Bergson and his “memory and matter” where he explains his concept of time and time perception. Refusing the kantian time constituted by immobile singularities and scientific objectivity of time, he says time is the succession of inner states. Therfore is a unity that still is not static because discloses a moltiplicity. Is a duration in which movement happens.
Movement, he says, is a movable section of duration. It expresses the change in the duration. Identification between the all and the duration. Movement is a translation in the space that brings to a change in the whole.
By narration i mean the proces of making explicit that duration. The narration is a repetitive and repetable act. Samples a duration of time and repeats it. Kids love to narrate and love to repeat. By repeting they learn. By repeating, part of the existing gets printed in our imagination like a painting. A painting that lasts in time. An image that evolves. That has a narrative. We print a story. Thats how I would define narration: as the print of a duration.
It is surprising how many differences in the perception of life there can be and how our living process is costantly made and integrated with narrations. Someone would expect to have just one big biographic narration. An objective and rational one. Determined and causal. Someone else could feel that every instant of his life is the door on an infinite time narration and that every narration could have infinite possibilities and modalities (a bit like the). Someone could adopt 5 or 10 different narrations that alternate. Some narrations get lost in the oblivion.
What’s for sure is that each of those have his own character and atmosphere and influences our perception. One of the responsabilities of a director is to choose this overall perception making. Building a reality. Creating a narrative to our personal reality. Not existing an objective reality to refer to and that can be recreated, what cinema does is to create a new perception of reality to which then we refer.
It is an experience that influences our personal experience. But does this have an effect or do we forget as fast as we forget our own experiences?
If cinema hasn’t made as a model the natural subjective perception, it’s because the mobility of his centers, the variability of his shots, lead it always to restore extensive noncentered and nonshoten zones. It tends to reach the first regime of image-movement, the universal variation, the total perception, objective and widespread.
The affect is independent from any determined space-time, but is created in a story that produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or of a time, of an epoc or an envirement (that’s why the affect is “the new”, and new affects never stop to be created, especially by the artwork).
Antonioni for example expresses emotion by posing the camera back and showing the entire frame. The emptiness. Not by zooming on someone crying.

And this influences the perception of the world that we are going to have after the movie ended.
“in as much as i consider an actor as being one element in a given scene I regard it as a tree a wall or a cloud that is just one element of the overall theme. Is not about their psychological reason, characters are elements”. Are also people, but he works on the abstract level. He concentrate on dead times and on those situations at the limits, able to absorb the character’s behavior, freeing the time from movement and concentrating on static situations.
All these little differences in choices of how to show events and emotions are foundamental on the overall feeling and aftermovie way of percieving reality. Antonioni tries, through his bare geometrical shots, to reach a void zone, a “white on white” that is impossible to film, properly invisible.
Although the examination of the bourgeois void is not carried by Antonioni as a critic to urbanization, industrial development of capitalism, and feelings exfoliation of modernity. All these themes, even tho are present, are filtered by a vision that is cleaned by any nostalgia feeling toward the past and that supports with convintion the new electrical technologies. In general Antonioni’s cinema is not nourished by a moral nostalgia or esthetical or sentimental toward an idialliac past (as Fellini’s and Visconti’s does), but instead shows an interest in the deserted, amorphous, disconnected, empty, abstract, spaces, where the charatcers are swallowed up.
It is the perception of a void, not meant as a formalistic escape from reality, but as intensification of reality itself, assumed as limit concept. Abecomingmeant,accordingtoDeleuze,asamovementorientedtowardathreshold of imperceptibility and invisibility. Seeking the absolute image, Antonioni tries to pose himself, exactlylikeDeluze,onthealwaysmobileridge betweenvisibleandinvisible,between micro perception and imperceptibility.
A becoming-imperceptible
The action, and also the perception and the affection, are shoten in a fabric of relations. Is a chain of relations which constitutes the mental image, opposed to the plot of actions, perceptions and affections.
Antonioni, in the moment of artistic creation, shows something that was already there but that we couldnt perceive yet: that impersonal “white on white” needs to be built.

For example in Il grido, the impossibility of an effective action on the world manifests itself, accompanied with a particular directorial approach to the landscape, that matches with the desperate character’s moods: the result, all in all, is right the impossibility of that sensorymotory scheme that in the past would have been the premise for an effective film script.
There is a secret happiness in Antonioni’s void spaces, because his cinema presents iteself as a rigorous investigation on the image of the flowing reality, hidden under the routine perception, pragmatically oriented toward human’s needs. It is a penetration in the grane of matter, imperceptible and invisible at a common experience level: “I think we always need to help the matter to compose”.
How much does the building of individual reality influence the esthetical perception and how mucuh do Antonioni’s movies have this effect, especially those in the uncomunicability trilogy?
“The plain, therefore consciousness, tracks a movement that makes possible that the things between it states itself dont stop to gather together in a whole, and the whole, doesn’t stop to divide itself between the things”
It is important now to undertseand the presence of many layers in which I can perceive a movie. There is for sure the two dimensional one that is the image. The many images that in sequence create the movie. At this level composition and shot are extremely important. Then there is the 3 dimentional level that is the movement of things in this shot. This can happen only in and thanks the 4th dimension of time. Thats where the importance of rithm but also of a narrative through time and not only through connections comes out. And through these 4 dimentions a fifth one is created that is the one of the spiritual we could say or of the perception. The one I’m focusing on in this essay. That is very volatile and elusive. So much that maybe wouldnt make sense to write about it because almost metaphyisical. Or we could say brings us far from the scientific field, in the poetic one.
“By suppressing the atmospheric prospective, dreyer makes stick out a properly temporal prspective or even spiritual: squizing the third dimension, he puts the two dimentional space in an immediate relation to the affect, with a fourth and fith dimention, time and spirit.” (Deleuze, Cinema1)