The Sense of Film Narration

This book investigates the sensuous qualities of narration in the feature-length fiction film. Ian Garwood provides a comprehensive account of existing work on film narration and offers an overview of the sensuous aspects of cinematic storytelling – for example, the image becomes ‘soft’ in order to signal the representation of a character’s memory or a ‘scratchy’ version of a song plays on the soundtrack in order to shape the viewer’s understanding of the images it accompanies – as demonstrated through a broad selection of films. The films used as case studies in the book are particularly ‘multi-layered’, in that they all make extensive use of materials with sensuously contrasting visual and/or aural properties: for example, films whose images are a combination of colour and monochrome e.g. The Wizard of Oz whose soundtracks feature multiple voiceover narrators e.g. All About Eve or which feature multiple performers portraying the same character e.g. the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There.