![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Audiovisual texts rely on their polysemiotic nature to create audiovisual narrative. For audiences who do not have access to any one of the semiotic codes, the very essence of the narrative is compromised. The nature of these texts has changed to such an extent that they have to be re-narrativised. Within that part of the field of audiovisual translation (AVT) that aims at providing access to audiovisual texts to viewers excluded from the visual codes, audio narration (AN) is discussed as a mode that seeks to provide access through an integrated, independent narrative. This mode is suggested as an alternative to the established mode of audio description (AD), both modes being found on a descriptive–narrative continuum. The article begins by investigating the problems posed to AN by the iconicity of narrative film. It is then shown how focalisation in film manifests in a number of filmic markers that have to be substituted by linguistic markers derived from written narrative in an audio narration that is integrated with the remaining iconic codes of the soundtrack. Finally, the argument is illustrated by means of a discussion of the opening sequences of Everything is illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005).
Notes
1. This user group could be defined as any audience or audience member excluded from any or all of the visual codes of the audiovisual text for whatever personal or physical circumstance. For the purposes of this article, this will primarily refer to blind and partially sighted audiences.
2. As Chatman (1990, p. 16) states, ‘“to describe” is different from “to narrate”, and if we were asked for the typical verb for representing Description, we would cite the copula (or its equivalent) rather than the more active kind of verb. We would say that the subject was so-and-so, not that it did so-and-so’. Chatman argues that description is as much part of narrative as narration (and argumentation).
3. See Van der Heijden (Citation2007) for an in-depth discussion of the complexity of the film soundtrack and the importance of respecting this semiotic level when producing AD.
4. Seeing all the (speaking) characters as covert narrators (cf. Kozloff, Citation2000) is technically correct with respect to the narrative of each individual character, but these micro-textual narratives seldom fulfil any macro-textual narrative role – they remain framed narrators at best.
5. Gerard Genette first introduced the term in his Narrative discourse (Citation1980, p. 186) to address the confusion between ‘Who sees?’ and ‘Who speaks?’. Since then it has been a pervasive presence in narratology and subsequently in film studies, although the term is by no means stable.
6. Even though Jost (2004) identifies the literary concepts of ‘point of view’ or ‘focalisation’ as central to a comparative narratology between cinema and literature, he distinguishes between focalisation (stripped of its visual connotations, meaning subjective access to the mind of characters – ‘thinking and knowing’) and ocularisation (‘perceiving’). He points out that although literary theorists (mistakenly) refer to the camera metaphorically as an objective perspective, in film it can be either objective or subjective.
7. The filmic narrative origo may be defined in brief as a deictic and orientational position and vortex that represents the centre from which and into which the narrative originates through the shared activity or function of filmic narrative impostulation.Filmic narrative impostulation may in turn be defined as a presentational and interpretive activity shared by the filmic authorial collective on the one hand (including the audio describer, sometimes called the ‘narrator’ of AD, and the AD and AN scriptwriters) and the audience on the other hand. See Kruger (2009) for a discussion of narrative impostulation in written fiction.
8. Mainar (1993, p. 155) introduces the term ‘auto-focalisation’ because the mimetic quality of focalisation in cinema means that ‘a certain part of the process of focalisation may be carried out by the image itself, and about itself’.
9. This access to the story world as an activity performed also by the audience will be defined in more detail elsewhere as filmic narrative impostulation.
10. Mainar's (1993) argument, for example, is built around the fact that things such as mise-en-scène and the mimetic presentation of characters auto-focalise.
