In my experience as a moviegoer, the viewers can sometimes find it difficult to define the characters, specifically when the characters are not people. For example, in the film Dare Devil, Hell's Kitchen, a Manhattan neighborhood is the movie's setting. The protagonist was raised there and as an effect of the neighborhood's gritty and foul traits, he becomes the anti hero set out to serve justice. Throughout the film the Kitchen portrays a dark and malevolent personality that is often the source of the other character's conflicts.
In many ways Hell's Kitchen is a character, but not in the traditional sense. Bordwell's definition of a character being the agent of cause and effect is a compelling way to include non humans like Dare Devil's Hells Kitchen. Furthermore, despite the Kitchen's lack of bodily representation, this issue is not far from Bordwell's example of Obi-Wan in The Empire Strikes Back. Bordwell shows that a character can exist without a body. As long as the "character in question" has traits such as personality and intention then it is a character.
Bordwell's analysis of time and space in film narration was interesting.
ReplyDeleteI got a lot out of his fleshing out of restricted narration, unrestricted narration, and mixed and fluctuating narration. The narration styles have different effects on various film genres (mystery, suspense, drama, etc.) You can use restricted narration to keep secrets from viewers to later reveal as big Aha! moments and close some part of your narrative (like in the Sixth Sense), or you can create suspense by having unrestricted narration where the viewer knows more than the character - who may be stepping into a terrible thing that we know is coming, but they don't (unrestricted narration)causing suspense, or the possibility of surprise, because our expectations for how a certain narrative should play out can be dashed by some unexpected event in the film - Hitchcock makes great use of this mixing of restricted and unrestricted narration.
Nick, I like the idea of bodiless "characters." Environments built within films by space and sensory details can convey a certain feel or sublimity that is more compelling than the narrative and characters of the movie- like in Lynch or Tarkovsky's films.
The idea of bodiless characters in film is explored in a different way by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema as "organs without bodies," an inversion of Deleuze's concept of the "body without organs" - Dr. Strangelove's hand in Dr. Strangelove is an example of this concept.