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12. Parametric Narration
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his is the least "public," most rarely discussed sort of narration I shall consider, and it will be the most controversial. The very name poses a problem. I could call it "style centered," or "dialectical," or "permutalional," or even "poetic" narration. "Parametric" was chosen in reference to Noel Burch's Theory of Film Practice, in which he uses the term "parameters" to describe what 1 call film techniques. But nomenclature is only the start of the difficulties. This type of narration is not linked to a single national school, period, or genre of filmmaking. Its norms seem to lack the historical concreteness of the three modes I have considered so far. In many ways, the pertinent historical context is less that of filmmaking than that of film theory and criticism. To some extent, then, this mode of narration applies to isolated filmmakers and fugitive films. I shall also be pointing to formal processes that film criticism typically ignores, even when studying the films I will mention. Making these processes my central focus will inevitably strike some readers as implausible. Here I can ask only patience and a willingness to consider that, at least in some films, apparently trivial aspects may turn out to be essential.
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A New Role for Style
As previous chapters have shown, stylistic patterns tend to be vehicles for the syuzhet's process of cueing us to construct the fabula. This is most apparent in classical narration, in which film technique, though highly organized, is used principally to reinforce the causal, temporal, and spatial arrangement of events in the syuzhet. The "invisibility" of the style is a function both of its role in supporting the syuzhet und of its conformity with extrinsically normalized principles and procedures. In art-cinema narration and historical-materialist narration, style is more prominent by virtue of its deviation from classical norms and its tendency to deviate, however slightly, from extrinsic norms of the mode. But the film's unique deployment of stylistic features nonetheless remains subordinate to syuzhet-defined functions: to create realism, expressive subjectivity, authorial commentary, or a play among such factors (art-cinema narration); or to create vivid perceptual heightening of a narrative/rhetorical construct (historical-materialist narration).
Yet there exists another sort of narration, one in which the film's stylistic system creates patterns distinct from the demands of tiie syuzhet system. Film style may be organized and emphasized to a degree that makes it at least equal in importance to syuzhet patterns.
Most critics and theorists are inclined to recognize the dominance of style only in abstract or nonnarrative films, when there is no syuzhet present at all. Yet there is also the possibility of what Tynianov called as early as 1927 "style-centered" narative cinema.1 We can imagine a narrative cinema in which there is still a syuzhet, but "the rise and fall of the stylistic masses" come to the fore.' This split, however, is too simple. We must also allow the possibility that syuzhet and style may become equal in importance. Moreover, since a film operates through time, we must consider that syuzhet processes and stylistic processes may alternate in emphasis.
Analogies with other arts may be helpful here. Most films resemble novels or short stories in that the stylistic surface functions chiefly to expose syuzhet patterns. But parametric narration is more like what goes on in "mixed" arts. In a
narrative poem, the construction of a story is often subordinated to the demands of verse. Poe's Raven croaks "Nevermore," and the narrator loves someone named Lenore. partly because of the requisites of rhyme. In opera or the art song, the music's unfolding may not simply accompany the text but impose its own patterns on iti Cinematic style; the repetition and development of instantiations of film technique, may likewise become what Tynianov calls the "dominant," the factor that is pushed forward at the expense of others, "deforming" them.'
Another way to clarify the parametric idea is to trace its historical development. Certainly the notion that stylistic organization could achieve formal saliency has been around for some time. As my citations from Tynianov imply, the Russian Formalists granted stylistic factors considerable importance. In poetic language, writes one Formalist, "linguistic patterns acquire independent value."4 The Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský distinguished between linguistic distortion that was motivated by the poem's subject matter and linguistic distortion operating for its own sake.5 This tendency was not confined to the criticism of verse. As early as 1919, Viktor Shklovsky argued that narrative involved parallels between syuzhet composition and linguistic patterning—a distinction which presumed the possibility of noncoincidence between the two systems.0 In the domain of cinema, Eisenstein suggested that in shot conflict and "over-tonal" montage, purely stylistic features can create patterns independent of immediate narrative needs.7 Still, it was not for some decades that such ideas were systematically applied.
One of the most important trends in European music of the 1950s was ."total serialism." The model is usually held to be Messiaen's i 94 8 piece. Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, which extended the idea of the scale from pilch to the spheres of duration, loudness, and attack. Young composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Jean Barraqué began to use Schoenberg's principles of the twelve-tone row to generate music of unprecedented formal complexity. By assigning codified values to the intervals in the pitch row, or series, the composer could systemat-
ically vary meter, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, and attack. Schoenberg had chiefly used the row for harmonic and melodic purposes, hut according to the young composers, Webern had glimpsed the generative possibilities of serial functions. Now. wrote Boulez. "the architecture of the work derives directly from the ordering of the series."" The composer could select certain "parameters" (pitch, rhythm, etc.) to be serialized and then lay out a table of all possible permutations based on intervals in the row. or rhythmic "cells," or whatever.8 The goal of integral serialism was a new unity, in which a single structure dictates the entire piece, from local texture to overall form.10 For our purposes, the crucial aspect of serialist doctrine is the possibility that large-scale structure may be determined by fundamental stylistic choices.
Although exact causal links are hard to find, many experimental trends in French literature of the period resemble serial thinking. The nouveau roman, which rose to prominence in the mid-1950s, was also concerned with the generation of large-scale forms out of limited verbal material. Michel Butor's Uemploi du temps (1956). Alain Robbe-Grille t's La jalousie (1957). and Claude Mauriac's Toutes les femmes sont fatales (1957) mixed together fragmentary blocks of time in a way that suggested a hidden formula controlling surface variants. The so-called nouveau nouveau roman, associated with the journal Tel Quel, went still further in exposing the novel's structural armature. At the same time. Raymond Queneau and other writers formed OuLiPo, a group devoted to building new' poetic texts out of existing ones by use of rule-governed procedures.
Structure, wrote Boulez in 1963, was a key word in his theory, and he went on to cite Lévi-Strauss as showing that this concept transcended the dichotomy of form and content." That heterogeneous intellectual movement known as structuralism significantly changed the way linguists, literary critics, and philosophers conceived of textual form. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, several influential structuralist thinkers introduced concepts that encouraged "parametric" thinking. Although we must lake care not to conflate serialism and structuralism, there are several im-
portant points of similarity. All involve the.relation of local structure, or stylistic events, to large-scale structure.
Both serialism and structuralism held that textual components form an order that coheres according to intrinsic principles. In more technical terms, the structuralist looks first at the organization of signifiers; only then does the analyst correlate that to a system of references or sigpifieds. Roman Jakobson's theory holds poetry to be autotelic,'relying upon the play of linguistic categories to block referential meaning. Similarly, Boulez emphasizes that the series creates its meaning immanently, by virtue of its unique ordering of parameters. Many literary experiments in the wake of the nouveau roman rely solely upon the generative powers of the signifier—anagrams, puns, or other verbal ploys that get stretched out to form large-scale patterns.12 This line of thought suggests that style (often called écriture)_may form an independent structure in the text. Style need be governed only by internal coherence, not by representational function.
Serial and structuralist theory also .treat textual form as a "spatial" phenomenon. This notion can be defined in two ways. First, the "visible," phenomenal text gets treated as a configuration whose parts exist simultaneously. In analyzing a myth, Lévi-Strauss lays out the actions in a horizontal line.15 Boulez speaks of a piece as a "concrete sound object" occupying "musical space."'* Jakobson tends to treat the poem as a simultaneous order, a design in language stretched across the page. Claude Simon's novel La route de Fiandrcs (i960) possesses an overt shape: there are three passes through the same point, and successive events are presented as if simultaneous. In a 1964 essay, "Le langage de ľéspace," Michel Foucault discusses several other nouveaux romans which undertake a similar project.,s The outstanding spokesman for the spatiajity of the literary text has been Michel Butor, who suggests taking the three-dimensional connotations of volumen literally. He treats the book as possessing "a mobility which most nearly approximates a simultaneous presence of all parts of work."16 He itemizes many features—horizontals and verticals, oblique patterns, margins, typography, layout—through which the text creates a spatial order.
PARAMETRIC NARRATION
277
There is another sense in which the aesthetic text may be considered as having spatial form, and this bears on "invisible" properties. The ordering of parts can be treated as a distribution of elements drawn from a fixed storehouse "behind the scenes." In serial music, the series is not a simple succession of pitches but what Boulez calls an underlying hierarchy of functions.17 Strings of notes, rhythm, attack, and other temporal features of the piece spring from an unchanging generative formula. In other media, this process was theorized by Jakobson and Roland Barthes according to the Saussurean principles of syntagm and paradigm. The syntagm is the combined string of items visibly present in the text. The paradigmatic axis is that set from which each item is selected. The presence of one item thus inevitably ! signals the absence of others that could substitute for it.
That the paradigmatic dimension creates a "virtual space" in the text is especially emphasized in the work of Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson. In 1955. Lévi-Strauss argued that myth is a particular kind of story composed of "gross constituent units." These are defined not only by their position in a horizontal chain of actions but by their relation to purely conceptual ("vertical") categories. The mythologist could analyze the text by spatializing It: write each action.on a card, then lay out the cards in a two-dimensional array in order to discover both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes." At a 1958 conference. Roman Jakobson proposed a comparable theory of stylistic construction in poetry by claiming that the poetic function of language was characterized by the projection of "the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination."19 That is, in poetry, a string of signs tends to embody in linear form the paradigmatic groups basic to its constitution. "The cat sat on the mat" projects the paradigmatic category of phonological similarity (rhyme) onto the syntagmatic level of the line. Any sequence of units—phonological, syntactic, semantic—strives to build an equality with others, creating designs within the poem, "similarity superimposed upon contiguity."10
One consequence of these ideas is that the phenomenal form of the text tends to be seen as a permutational distribu-
tion of the invisible set. According to Boulez, the piece is only / '.'a sort of probable fragment" drawn from hundreds of possi- i ble variants of chosen parameters." Lévi-Strauss treats different versions of myths in the same way; any one mythical text is only one manifestation of a larger permutation group. The nouveau roman and its successors made much of this principle. Robbe-Grillet's novels characteristically make each scene a slightly incompatible variant upon a central event, which may never be presented in an authoritative fashion. Jean-Louis Baudry's Personnes (1967) contains eighty-one sections, each one playing out a different combination of personal pronouns; the last page obligingly maps out all the possibilities on a nine-by-nine square. Perhaps the limit case is Marc Saporta's Composition no. 1 (196a), an j unbound sheaf of leaves without pagination, to be read in any order. "The number of possible combinations," the author announces, "is infinite. "**
Where, one might now ask, does all this leave the per-ceiver? Perceiving a poem, novel, or a piece of music is a. time-bound activity; yet the concept of a frozen textual de-' sign deliberately ignores that process. The perceiver may not grasp the signifiers as forming a total order, and the paradigmatic dimension and permutational play may go unnoticed. At one point. Boulez admits that serial music's structures are not necessarily audible." I shall consider this point in more detail later, but it is worth mentioning that both serialism and structuralism are often hard pressed to show that the work's formal principles are registered by the perceiver.
In sum. serialism and structuralism both reveal new conceptions of form that give style great significance. In integral serialism, local textural choices could be seen as generating the entire work's form. The self-referring aspects of stylistic patterning could create an independent level of the text, as in Jakobson's account of poetry'. At the macroscopic level/, structuralism and serialism provide a conception of spatial , form which 'treats any discrete configuration as one para- j digmatic possibility, and thus only a variant of a hidden | order. There are, however, important differences between the two schools. Serialism is a means of composition, struc-
luralism a method of analysis. For Lévi-Strauss. structuralism is to seriaiism as religion is to free thought.'4 Umberto Eco develops this point by suggesting that, as a musical practice, serial composition challenges the intertextual codes which are the chief objects of structural analysis." Both schools emphasize the organization of signifiers, the ( spatialization of form, permutation, and nonperceptible structures, but seriaiism values transgression and the need for each artwork to construct a unique system. In other words, structuralist thought tends to emphasize the extrinsic norms that constrain syntagm and paradigm, while serialist thought emphasizes the creation of prominent intrinsic norms. It is significant thai when self-consciously parametric films and a theory of parametric cinema emerged, both owed more to seriaiism and the nouveau roman than to structuralism.
Two films are landmarks in the cinema of parametric narration. Vannée derniěre á Marienbad (1961), the product of a collaboration between Robbe-Crillet and Alain Res-1 Ulis,.is virtually a nouveau roman on film. Each scene, while teasing the spectator with the possibility of causal and temporal relations with other scenes, remains finally significant as a variant of abstract narrative topoi (e.g., a man tries to persuade a woman to leave with him). In this respect, the film relies on what Stephen Heath calls Itobbe-Grillet's characteristic bricolage of "syntagmatic elements of traditional narrative."* At the same time, Ľannée derniěre ä Marienbad elevates various stylistic features to the level of intermittently dominant structures: the splitting of image from sound, the use of false eyeline matches and matches on action, the refusal of camera movement to adhere to the action or to reveal a coherent offscreen space.27 The film thus treats syuzhet and style as organizations of fixed elements, varied and circulated across the text, suggesting a coherent fabula world while again and again denying that any such entity can be constructed.
What Ľannée derniěre á Marienbad was to the nouveau roman, Méditerranéc (1963) was to the Tel Quel group. Few films can have been so seldom seen and so often cited. Like Marienbad, Médilerranée resulted from a collaboration.
here between poet and novelist Philippe Sollers and filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet. The film consists of 261 brief shots, musical passages, and a poetic commentary by Sollers. The visual track is based on a small set of elements: the sea, statuary, pyramids, ruins, an ingot forged in a factor)', a garden, a bullfight, a woman on an operating table, and so forth. Most of the shots are cliches of "the Mediterranean," and it is part of the film's aim to recombine images in ways that drain them of their stereotyped associations. Tel Quel adherents praised the film as an "open" text, organized wholly as a play of signifiers, arid Pollet has suggested that the film was composed by permuting a series.28 Médilerranée thus operates with a thoroughly spatialized form, putting itself, according to Sollers, within a cinema of "differed presence": "literal but also partial presence, a presence which presents an absence and. here, a.film.which manifests another, invisible film of which the voice injected into the film records the fluctuations."29
Both Ľannée derniěre á Marienbad and Médilerranée were made in full consciousness of the serialist aesthetic. It remained to show that this esthetic could be applied to films that had no direct influence from experimental literature or music. In 1967, Noel Burch published several articles in Cahiers du cinema that were later collected in the volume Praxis du cinema (1969; in English, Theory of Film Practice, first published in 1973). These writings constitute a powerful argument for a serialist theory of film.
Burch arranges film techniques into parameters, or stylis^ tic procedures: the spatial-temporal manipulation of editing, the possiblities of framing and focus, and so forth. He constructs each parameter as a set of alternatives: sometimes as oppositions (soft focus/sharp focus, djrect sound/mixed sound), sometimes as sets (the fifteen types of spatiotem-poral matches, the six zones of offscreen space). He goes on to extend the concept of parameter to include narrative factors (subject matter, plot line, etc.). Burch then takes a crucial step. He posits.that technical parameters are as functionally important to the film's overall form as are narrative ones. "Film is made first of all out of images and sounds; ideas intervene (perhaps) later."w Instead of simply man-
PARAMETRIC   NAHKaiuí,.
iŕesting the plot, the film's decoupa^e can become a system in its own right.   .
This is accomplished, Burch suggests, by a process of dialectical structure. Here "dialectics" refers to "the con-flictual organization to which these elementary parameters have been subjected. "3I The poles of selected parameters are in effect paradigmatic alternatives. Burch thus expects both poles of the dialectic to be manifested in the film, just as Jakobson treats poetry as projecting paradigmatic equivalences onto the text's syntagmatic succession. The film's dialectic must also be justified by some systematic quality, by an overall structure possessing its own logic. Burch evidently has permutational principles in mind. The fifteen different ways of combining shots, for instance, are capable of "rigorous development through such devices as rhythmic alternation, recapitulation, retrogression, gradual elimination, cyclical repetition, and serial variation, thus creating structures similar to those of twelve-tone music."" Thus stylistic structure can become as thoroughly organized as narrative structure. "It is only through a systematic and thorough exploration of the structural possibilities inherent in the cinematic parameters I have been describing that film will be liberated from the old narrative forms and develop new 'open' forms that will have more in common with the formal strategies of post-Debussy an music than with those of the pre-Joycean novel.""
Burch's debt to serial thought is already evident in these quotations. In 1961, he had translated into English André Hodeiťs Since Debussy, a book deeply infused with serial assumptions and a model, in its use of terms like "dialectics" and the "spatial organization of sound," for Burch's nomenclature. Boulez's Penser la musique ďaujourďhui U963) is another source for the exhaustive taxonomies and the polemical fervor of Praxis du cinema. Both Hodeir and Boulez emphasize the way in which serial practice challenges established procedures, a point echoed constantly by Burch in his assault on "zero-degree filming." And Burch often uses serial music as a formal model, as when he suggests that the films narrative can be generated out of technical parameters, just as the tone row generates large-scale
forms." But he is careful not to push the analog)' loo J' film cannot be organized as rigorously as a musical | the former is not susceptible to mathematical schema" tion and is usually committed to concrete representatř Musical practice offers a suggestive analogy, not a recj
The years immediately after the publication of volume reveal that he had some influence on the-ÖB group." Oudart's theory of the "suture" and Boniizeťs. essay on offscreen space can be interpreted as jepUes to Burch's work.3i_On the whole, though, the: parametric cinema became of. secondary importan film culture drawn to semiology, Lacanian psyche and Althusserian Marxism, After May 1968, not these theoretical systems seem more politically per they also allowed critics to turn their attention to film.' Burch frankly despised—the products of Hollywood! cism. Not until somewhat later did his work start to ap more significant. In America and Britain, the serial; tions of Burch's theory' had some impact.38 Participan 1977 colloquium, "Cinemas of Modernity," used B concepts to analyze films by Eisenstein and Robbe-. And Burch's next major book. To the Distant Form and Meaning in Japanese Film (1979), aroust siderable interest—partly for its contribution to a st history of the cinema, but also perhaps because its limij to the conventional category of a national cinema eclectic Marxism made its argument seem less in" gendy "formalist" than the ultimately more fruitful tions of Praxis du cinema. That very few film scl followed up Burch's insights (and those of Eisenst the Formalists, for that matter) is no reason to ignore especially if they can help us explain the specific wor particular films.
T^is, history of the concept of "parametric" narr "sRetches the outline of an aesthetic theory, but it c provide a rationale. In logical terms, it is difficult to den style could be promoted to the level of a shaping force film, but many critics will suggest that in practice th' happens. It remains to show that such objections suggest how style may achieve this role.
hapes and Strategies
)n general, a film's stylistic patterning splits away from the syyzhel when only "artistic" motivation can account for it. .That is. if the viewer cannot adequately justify the stylistic .work as necessary for some conception of realism, for trans-textual ends such as genre, or for compositional requirements, then he or she must take style as present for its own sa^fi, aiming to become palpable as such.
Let us take a set of comparisons involving one stylistic procedure, the "graphic match." This is inherently a non-f "narrative device: lines, shapes, colors, movement, or other 1 graphic qualities in one shot are closely "matched" by a jmülar configuration in the next shot, regardless of the i space or time depicted. Consider first of all two contiguous 1 shots from Lady Wiitdermere's Fan (figs. 12.1-12.2). The ,. overall similarity of composition is apparent—each figure is \ in the same spot, head and body are roughly comparable, light and dark values are somewhat consistent. In the clas-. steal narrative cinema, this "approximate" graphic match screens out irrelevant data and guides our attention to narratively salient differences from shot to shot, such as expressions and angle of character orientation. Next, consider the graphic matches during one of Diego's reveries in La guerre est/íwíf (figs. 10.19-10.21). Here the graphic continuity is much stronger, and it is motivated for compositional ends typical of art-cinema narration. The matches convey the subjective alternatives that Diego posits: Nadine may look like this, or this, or that.... In comparison, there is the vivid graphic match of father and son arguing in Earth (figs. 7.26-7.27). Here again, the stylistic device is subordinate to syuzhet ends—thwarting the construction of a denotative space and cueing a connotative construction (the expression of fierce opposition). Finally, consider the graphic match of two schoolboys playing with a globe in Ozu's What Did the lady Forget? (figs. 12.3-12.4). The similarities of composi-1  don across the cut create a much more precise graphic I match than in Lady Windermere's Fan. And these cuts are I not   explicable   on   art-cinema   or   historical -materialist >  grounds, unless one contends that the cuts present a narra-
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tional commentary that the boys are somehow "alike." But this justification would be unspecific (it could apply to any of the graphic matches we have considered) and banal (1 shall suggest shortly why parametric narration drives critics to banality): in a word, desperate. The most adequate motiva-
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13.3.  What Did the Lady Forget?
12.4.  What Did the Lady Forget?

tion tor Ozu's cut is a purely aesthetic one. Incongruity and humor arise from the palpable manipulation of the stylistic parameters of composition and cutting. Syuzhel needs are subordinated to the play of graphic space.
Now, any film might contain an aesthetically motivated
flourish—a gratuitous camera movement, an and unjustified color, shift or sound bridge. In the1 the flourish is an embellishment, expressing what, Gombrich describes as "the joyful exuberance :)fa man who displayed both his control and his inventivM The flourish exhibits aesthetic motivation becaus the artwork's materials and forms perceptually.»; graphic match, however, is not a flourish; the devi frequently and systematically. (Here is another rea: resisting the banal interpretation that these boy$ are". for to apply this principle to all of Ozu's graphic m would lead merely to vacuity.) In parametric narration is organized «cross the film according to distinct prinfo just as a narrative poem exhibits prosodic patterning operatic scene fulfills a musical logic. Godard's VňvrĚ will illustrate this process.
Vivre sa vie announces itself as "a film in twelve • Each episode includes one or more scenes and is bra« off by fades and numbered intertitles. At the level style, each segment is characterized by one or morev* on possible camera/subject relations. In the credif quence. Nana is presented in three close-up viewsl her left profile, one frontal shot, and one of her right This announces the "theme" of varying camera orientations. In the first episode, the camera present talking with her husband; both are framed from ( This completes the circuit around her begun di credits and emphasizes that in the film's narrative,! spatial relations with her surroundings will func' material for the stylistic variants. Later sequences e" range of alternatives. Two characters in dialogue" filmed by a camera right on the 180-degrec line be? them (Episodes 4 and 5). There are various option respect to camera movement as well: a laterally camera (Episode 2). a forward tracking camera(6), í pan shot (12). There are variants upon an arcing movement- one in which the conversing figu" arranged perpendicular to the lens axis (Episoth ; in which they sit parallel to it (Episode 7). Episcd montage sequence highly fragmented by editing, W
e g consists of very long takes. The only moments in hkh a conversation is handled in classical shot/reverse come within a "quoted" passage—the excerpt from Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne ď Arc in F.pisode 3—and fathin the penultimate episode, during the conversation with Brice Parain, "Quoting" and postponing the most orthodox stylistic option throw the other alternatives into higher jetief. Stylistically, the film moves through a paradigm of ternatives to orthodox shot/reverse shot, forming a clear nstance of what Jakobson calls the projection of the axis of lection into the axis of combination." ► A skeptic cannot, I think, deny that the stylistic organization of the film exhibits these features. The problem is what [odo with them. Someone might claim that they are just ornamentation. But this would be like saying that rhythm and rhyme merely embellish a poem. The exhaustive way in which these stylistic alternatives are presented in the film Id militate against their being simply filler material. V. F. IjPerkins writes of the film as "a series of dialogues on which Godard's camera plays a suite of variations, offering both an actual mise en scene and a string of suggestions as to how one might film a conversation."0 Against the background of classical narration. Vivre sa vie's stylistic devices achieve a structural prominence that is more than simply ornamental. t Granted that these stylistic patterns are present and important, the critic is tempted to "read" them, to assign them thematic meanings. My skeptic might posit that Vivre sa vie is about the problem of communication, and therefore the stylistic devices can be taken as symbolizing the distance between people. Or—to take a currendy fashionable interpretive line—perhaps Vivre sa vie is actually "about cinema." On this account, the filmmaker's ambivalent relation to his medium is represented through a varied camera handling. Such interpretive moves seek to insert parametric narration into the art-cinema mode. Yet although films like Vivre sa vie are made and seen within the art-cinema institution, it does not follow that they answer to the sort of symbolic readings we have seen art-cinema narration solicit. The urge to read stylistic effects in this way must also be traced to a broader tendency, that of assuming that everything In any film (or any good film) must be interpretable
thematicaliy. Thematization of this sort typically loses the specificity of a film's narrational work. Every stylistic element gets read the same way: long shots unite characters, cuts divide them; vertical lines isolate or split a character, horizontal lines evoke freedom; point-of-view shots create power relations by making one character the "object" of another's look. In this game, though, every card is wild. Whenever Nana is in the same shot with the pimp Raoul, the interpreter can posit a "unity" between them. If you point out that Raoul will exploit her and eventually let her be killed, then the critic claims that Godard is being ironic in positing such a unity. If Nana and her lover look at each other, and if this is rendered in alternating optical point-of-view shots, then the critic can say that Nana remains feminized (object of the male look) or not (appropriation of the power to look). If we are prepared to equate camera and director, every film can be interpreted as "making a statement" about cinema.
Interpretation of this sort is wholly appropriate to such narrative forms as allegory, in which abstract, often doctrinal meanings constitute the dominant structuring force of the text. In other forms, however, thematic meaning is only one component in the system, and not necessarily a very important one. The critic who thematizes technique in every film risks banalizing works which take as their "dominant" the perceptual force of style. For the problem is not just that thematization rends to rely on the cliches of sophomore literary criticism. Even at its best, thematization aims to assimilate the particular to the most general, the concrete to the woolly. It is perhaps for this reason that parametric filmmakers have tended to employ strikingly obvious themes. Not much acumen is needed to identify Play Time as treating the impersonality of modern life. Tokyo Story as examining the decline of the "inherently" Japanese family, or Vivre sa vie as dealing with contemporary urban alienation and female desire. It is as if stylistic organization becomes prominent only if the themes are so banal as to leave criticism little to interpret.
Possessed of a horror vacui, the interpretive critic clings to theme in order to avoid falling into the abyss of "arbitrary" style and structure. The critic assumes that everything in the film should contribute to meaning. If style is not decora-
P A H A M E T RIC  NARRATION
'lion, it must be motivated com positionall y or realistically or, best of all. as narrational commentary. Yet the error lies in assuming that style and syuzhet have a fixed relation to one another. It is important to recall that in any film, syuzhet structure—the selection and organization of story events— does not unequivocally determine a single stylistic presentation. (See p. 50.) There is always a degree of arbitrariness, which parametric cinema exploits. In the first episode of Vivre sa vie, Nana's conversation with Paul could be staged, shot, and cut in many ways and still convey the fabula information about their separation. As Perkins puts it: "Scenes whose action is static are filmed with a mobile camera, but the precise nature of the camera's movements is so far irrelevant to the recorded settings, faces, movements, and gestures that the various treatments could be interchanged from scene to scene without affecting our knowledge or understanding of the action in any substantial way."*3 If a film's stylistic devices achieve prominence, and if they are organized according to more or less rigorous principles, independent of syuzhet needs, then we need not motivate style by appealing to thematic considerations.
Is such narration a widespread filmmaking strategy? No, but significant filmmakers have employed it, especially those not aligned with national schools or movements. Some, such as Ozu and Bresson, seem to have done so intuitively; others have been more theoretically self-conscious, as we have seen in French cinema of the 1960s. Godard, for example, could not have been unaware of combinatory theories of serial music and the nouveau roman when he made Vivre sa vie. And what of the spectator? Do parametric principles constitute a widespread viewing norm? Certainly not as such. I shall suggest later, however,
1 that parametric narration does tend to produce effects that many spectators register. Furthermore, as Perkins's remarks on Vivre sa vie suggest, viewers who are sensitive to style can notice such patterns. Of course, many viewers do not have such a sensitivity. Just as serial music may require training, practice, and some theoretical knowledge to become intelligible, so too may parametric narration. Burch puts it corrosively: "And why shouldn't the eye exercise itself? Why should filmmakers not address themselves to an
elite, just as composers have always done at periods? We define 'elite' as those people willing trouble to see and resee films (many films), asj-' listen and relisten to a lot of music in order to app^ last quartets of Beethoven or the work of Webe-
I can imagine one more objection to the conce metric narration. Can the play of style in such, possess the perceptual and cognitive coherent syuzhet patterning does? The spectator unifies th. system causally, temporally, and spatially. Its.ij events.   We   can   identify   intersubjective  ass*. hypotheses, and inferences with respect to it If th system omits a story event, we can make more or' guesses about it. But what does stylistic patlerninE It cannot have causal unity, and it must achieve a* nent" organization of cinematic space and lime. It have no clearly designated units, perhaps only the the "stylistic figure." And how could a spectator purely stylistic hypothesis or inference, or know th tic element has been omitted, or that a stylistic dev is taking place? If a stylistic pattern is not depend" syuzhet, it would seem at best highly unpredicta" worst simply random, never salient. Could the spec" perceive the stylistic structures of parametric n;
This is a very strong objection. A counterargunr start with Gombrich's suggestion that there is a between the perception of meaning, which he lin sentational art, and the perception of order, whie ates with decorative and abstract art.45 Normalities are not easily distinguished, since our. order is shot through with assumptions and ex about meaning. But in art, representational mejöi played down or withheld, and sheer perceptual become strongly profiled. This happens in abstract which either expels denotative meaning or over pure design. One can see a table and a guitar in life, but their identifiable meaning is second; organization of the whole. Much the same through the organization of cinematic space an parametric cinema.
Can this order be empirically perceived? We
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lis problem has haunied discussions of inlegraJ serialism in isic. Many composers and theorists, anxious to permute Kvery sonic parameter, recognized thai the new music was so complex that the generating series and its transforma-|ons might never he grasped in performance.*1 The "spatial" Structuring was evident on paper hut not necessarily in irmance. The result, as Nicolas Ruwet suggested in Ď*959. is often.a perceived simplicity, as if the intricate ma-ipulalion of pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, and touch Jdeti only a music of brute instants.*' A sharp theoretical lallenge has been laid down by Leonard Meyer, who has «Ought to show that the form of serial music tends to be [imperceptible on four grounds.'*
1.  AH communication requires redundancy, but serial Smusic is insufficiently redundant. The total ordering of all [parameters makes the basic formal pattern difficult to perceive. Serial music also relies upon subtle shades of difference among various parameters, but when no parameters fare held constant, such differences cannot be spotted.
2.  Because serial music rejects traditional forms, we have fho schemata as aids to memory or guides for anticipation. [When every piece is unique, no one can grasp any of them.
3.  Some tonal combinations are more easily perceived ■and recalled than others; specifically, pitch and duration seem more "basic" than timbre and attack. But serial music
.ignores natural patterns of comprehension.
4.  Attention is a matter of allocating perceptual-cognitive ^resources. The pcrceiver thus has a limited "channel capacity." By packing so much novelty into a piece, the serial composer creates an overload that prevents more and less relevant events from being distinguished. Meyer is not saying that ordinary listeners typically cannot follow serial music. He is proposing that total serialist works may be formally imperceptible to all listeners. "Even if... a coterie of aficionados devoted their full perceptual capacities to this music, it is doubtful that they would ultimately succeed in really learning to understand it aurally."*9
It is possible to agree with Meyer and hold that a wholly parametric use of film style is not perceivable in viewing. Noßl Burch writes: "A structure exists when a parameter evolves according to some principle of progression that is
apparent to the viewer in the (healer, or perhaps only 10 the film-maker at his editing table, for. even though there may be structures that are 'perceptible only to those who have created them,'they nonetheless play an important role in the final aesthetic result."30 This sounds much like Boulez's claim that even if the ear does not perceive serial structures, it "registers" them.51 The locus classicus of this sort of defense has been Berg's opera Wozzeck, which unifies its score by an intrinsically musical logic: each act consists of pieces in different forms; each piece's tempo evolves from that of the preceding passage; each act ends with a cadence to the same chord; and so on.w Yet Berg insisted that his particular achievement was the music's "invisibility";
No one in the audience, no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in the framework of the opera, of the precision and logic with which it has been worked out. no one, from the moment the curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any attention to the various fugues, inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and passacaglias about which so much has been written."
Later 1 shall suggest that "unseen" structures can play some broader role in our response to a film. In general, however, an appeal to objectively present but imperceptible structures does not offer a strong explanation of parametric practices. After all, many structures in an artwork go unnoticed but also remain irrelevant to the work's aesthetic effect. Michael Riffaterre, in a devastatingcritique of Roman Jakobson's poetic analyses, has shown that not every pattern in a work is aesthetically functional or perceptually salient." A better line of defense is to argue that the most clear-cut cases of parametric narration can definitely be perceived in viewing.
In a parametric film, stylistic events can be noticed, their relation to the syuzhet can be hypothesized, aspects of their patterning can be noted and recalled. Parametric narration meets all four of Meyer's criteria:
i. Sufficient redundancy. Parametric cinema is not totally serial, since typically only a few parameters are highlighted and varied across the film. Vivre so vie, for instance.
PARAMETRIC   NARRATION
operates with distinct camera positions and editing options. Moreover, the syuzhet often provides a constant basis for stylistic change.
2.   Prior schemata. Parametric narration does not as a whole reject schemata as sources of order and expectation. The syuzhet will often be comprehensible according to the norms of classical narration or art-cinema narration. (There is in fact a predilection for quite predictable plot patterns.) Stylistically» the film will have a strong inner unity: a prominent intrinsic norm and patterned reiterations of that. Moreover, the style can be seen as "preformed" to a great degree, especially across a body of work. Ozu, Bresson, and other directors possess virtually preexistent stylistic systems which can reduce almost any subject to their own terms.
3.   Recognition of "natural" predispositions. Burch has pointed out that certain parameters seem more basic than others: image/sound relations, onscreen/offscreen space, editing alternatives. Whether these are more "natural" or not. it is likely that these are the most obvious targets of attention.
4.  Recognition of limited "channel capacity." Since cinema normally programs the order and duration of viewing, questions of redundancy and allocation of cognitive resources become pertinent. Parametric cinema is not totally serial, so the viewer's capacities are not necessarily taxed by an overwhelming range of stylistic elements. There is also, as we shall see, a tendency for this mode to work with simply additive forms. But there is no hiding that some parametric film do create "overload"; Tali's Play Time is a famous case." And even with more ascetic films, such as those of Bresson and Dreyer, the overall organization of parameters may well exceed detailed comprehension. At the close of this section I shall try to show that particular connotative effects may follow from the spectator's limited ability to construct intelligible patterns of style. Parametric cinema is thus, theoretically at least, perceptible in Meyer's terms. As we consider this mode's principles of organization, we must concentrate upon those that yield precise and intersubjective aesthetic effects.
In order for style to come forward across the whole film, it must possess internal coherence. This coherence depends
on establishing a distinctive, often unique intriir norm. We can distinguish two broad strategies, "ascetic" or "sparse" option, in which the film limits to a narrower range of procedures than are codifk extrinsic norms. The Mizoguchi of the mid- and la selects the long take in long shot or medium Bresson confines himself to the straight-on medi' often of body parts; Tati utilizes long shots with framing in deep space; and so on. Announced'at outset, such a limitation of devices constitutes a intrinsic  norm which  "processes" each syuzh' according to a recognizably "preformed" style.
By contrast, a more "replete" intrinsic norm CI inventory or a range of paradigmatic options   V,\ already seen that Vivre sa vie brings many disparate s procedures to bear on the problem of representing ch encounters. Burch has found the same to hukl truein_ M, in which each sequence plays a variant upon i temporal discontinuity.56 Typically, the ascetic 01 [sents a material similarity of procedures across, jjated syuzhet passages; the replete option creates among distinct portions of the syuzhet and varies, rial procedures used to present them. The strongh lated sequences in Vivre sa vie and M permit a clear son of different paradigmatic options at the Redundancy is achieved either by limiting the rang lístie procedures or by strictly paralleling segments syuzhet.
Establishing a distinctive intrinsic norm, either s: replete, may create deviations within the film. The approach is constantly foregrounding stylistic events"; each discrete stylistic event will tend to instantiate a dS procedure. More complex cases are Dreycr's Ordet andj trud. Each film takes a "sparse" approach by restfjg itself to slow lateral camera and figure movements takes; but each also sparingly cites isolated characteristic of classical style (shot/reverse sho\ matches, analyucal cutting). Thus Dreyer's fore moments achieve a kind of "replöteness," sami only in passing—a wider paradigmatic range than draws on generally.'7 More often, the ascetic tend
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jparadigmatic narration tends to conform closely toitsinlrin-jsic stylistic norm. This is achieved by creating a narrow and strongly individual bunch of parametric qualities and then liepeating them regularly across the film. In particular, the /ascetic mode plays upon what psychologists call "just-noticeable differences." Given a stringently limited range of ] procedures, the sparse approach can create a barely perceptible threshold between identical repetition and slight ivariation. In the films of Ozu, for instance, a return to a ifamiliar locale will be treated in a slightly rearranged sequence of views or with small changes of objects. How noticeable the differences are will vary. 1 shall suggest shortly that they cannot be minute, since spectators cannot spot or recall very slight changes; but it is one aim of the sparse approach to explore the boundary between what is and is not recognizable.
Once the intrinsic stylistic norm is in place, it must be developed. Style must create its own temporal logic. But Because the viewer's schemata for film style are limited, it is unrealistic to expect parametric form to exhibit detailed Intricacies. As in serial music, the more convoluted and the less redundant such form is, the more imperceptible it is likely to be. Consequently, parameters cannot all he varied simultaneously. Several must be held constant if repetition and variation are to be apparent. Moreover, the spectator is less likely to observe an isolated parameter than the stylistic "event." a recurrent local texture created by a cluster of devices. In Vivre sa vie, it is the combination of several factors—characters in spatial proximity, varied camera positions, and the editing patterns (or lack of them)—that creates the stylistic event that the narration permutes. Ozu's style achieves prominence through a similar effect of the interaction among figure position, frame composition, camera placement, use of offscreen space, and so on; the typical Ozu "moment" is a node of such parameters. This is not to say that each event will repeat every parameter, or that parameters cannot move off and recombine elsewhere in the film—only that if parametric play is to be perceived as ordered, it will be grasped in relation to some recurrent factors.
Despite Burch'scall for "rhythmic alternation, recapitulation, retrogression, gradual elimination, cyclical repetition, and serial variation," parametric form must develop simply. The most adequate musical models are additive forms such as strophic patterns, the rondo, and theme and variations. Here parts are related not by a hierarchical process but by structural parallelism and/or similarity of device. In parametric narration the syuzhet may well possess a cumulative overall shape, often of great structural symmetry'. but the stylistic patterning tends to be additive and open-ended, with no predictable point of termination. Vivre sa vie's survey of paradigmatic options betrays no evolving logic, while the succession of slightly varied procedures in DreyerorOzu is completely "reversible." As in the musical rondo or the theme and variations, the number of stylistic events can be indefinitely large, and there is room for many unexpected repetitions and differences.
In the replete approach, additive development displays a tendency toward permutational exhaustion of options within a paradigm. This we saw in Vivre sa vie's variants on "how to shoot and cut character interaction." Burch has been astute in finding films possessing paradigmatic principles; among his examples are Vne simple histoire, Cronaca di un Amore, and Renoir's Nana ("a model of the exhaustive use of offscreen space").4* The sparse approach, as I have mentioned, uses additive form to create "just-noticeable differences." Kristin Thompson has revealed this process at work in Play Time and in Bresson's Lancelot du Lac* To take another instance: One does not think of Fassbinder as an ascetic filmmaker, yet his Katzelmacher (1969) exemplifies how the sparse approach can produce slight variations. By reducing the number and types of setting, the angle of view (perpendicular, with few depth cues), the number of shots (one per scene), character movements (typically a tableau), shot transitions (the cut only), and camera movements (none, except as noted below). Katzelmacher creates a sparse intrinsic norm. An ambiguous durational scheme also encourages us to arrange the scenes in "columnar" rather than linear fashion. The narration develops as a combinatory scheme: same locale, different characters; different locale,

same characters; sa ment. One shot, w camera movement, film's intrinsic norm, a dialectical structure the two poles of a par once."0" As the film g also repeated, each tť teringinto the over Dreyer, Ozu. Bresson] live form invites us t1
In this mode, the nizing stylistic repeti distinct variations. \« (how will this scene: that compares one ing the earlier one Ordet and Gertrud, acters build up pu and where will the enter the shot? hypotheses about tion of the frame. hypotheses by ju ways. In Ah Autu Bar employs thr none of which is then a long shot street?); then a m take place inside in more orthodox should suffice to next scene at the across the street; ble to shot 2 in' staggers down arrives. The n' out in different the spectator earlier scenes in
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PARA M ETHIC  NARRATION
■nuition, recapitula-cyclical repetition.
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additive forms such
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of device. In para-»ossess a cumulative . symmetry, but the ve and open-ended, n. Vivre sa vie's sur-evolving logic, while jres in Dreyer or Ozu lusical rondo or the ylistic events can be >r many unexpected
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urch has been astute
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zelmacher creates a
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same characters; same locale, with or without figure movement. One shot, which includes nondiegetic music and camera movement, at first works as a deviation from the film's intrinsic norm, exemplifying Burch's suggestion that a dialectical structure can operate by "emphasizing one of the two poles of a parameter by using it rarely or perhaps only once."*" As the film goes on, however, this stylistic event is also repeated, each time with different characters, thus entering into the overall variation structure. As in the films of Dreyer. Ozu. Bresson, and Mizoguchi. Katzebnacher's additive form invites us to notice nuance.
In this mode, the spectator's task becomes one of recognizing stylistic repetition and staying alert for more or less distinct variations. We may speak of suspense hypotheses (how will this scene be handled?) and a "scanning" strategy that compares one stylistic event with preceding ones, giving the earlier one the status of "statement." For instance, in Ordet and Gertrud, the lateral tracking shots following characters build up purely spatiotemporal expectations. When and where will the character pause? Will another character enter the shot? Mizoguchi uses long takes to generate hypotheses about whether a character will fill a vacant portion of the frame. Ozu achieves a more playful rotation of hypotheses by juggling shot combinations in unpredictable ways. In An Autumn Afternoon, the first transition to Tory's Bar employs three shots: medium shot of a row of bar signs, none of which is Tory's (so will we now move inside one?); then a long shot of the street (so will a scene take place on the street?); then a medium shot of Tory's sign (so will the action take place inside?). The next transition to this locale begins in more orthodox fashion, with a shot of Tory's sign. This should suffice to signal any future scenes in Tory's. Yet the next scene at the bar begins with a long shot of the bar signs across the street; there follows a cut to a long shot (comparable to shot 2 in the first series) as our protagonist, Hirayama, staggers down the street and into the bar; cut inside as he arrives. The narration spreads the three shots of the first set out in different order, across two other transitions. This cues the spectator to notice the variants. Moreover, of the two earlier scenes in Tory's Bar, one had ended with a cut back to
the sign, and one had not. A cut to the sign in this last; is thus not clearly likely. And yet when Ozu does ciij sign at the end of the third scene, this shot is revt complete the t h erne-and-variation s pattern, since this; the one "missing" from the most recent variant: Sucl ful, constantly self-correcting shot combinations arě-í the most salient aspects of Ozu's parametric nanati(
Additive stylistic structures do not have a stronj tional quality, but the syuzhet does. Even if style bť the "dominant." in Tynianov's sense, the syuzhet operates partly to throw repeated and varied stylistic si into relief. Like the guitar in a Cubist still life, thesyi episode—a character conversation in Vivre sa vie, a vis bar in An Autumn Afternoon—becomes a reference] stylistic departures, a stable support for a freer, making.
Parametric narration can make syuzhet and style int in three ways. Style may completely and constantly, nate the syuzhet. This occurs rarely, but WuvelengtUľn affords a clear example. A plot (the events ol a cPi and a mysterious murder) is wholly subordinated;! internal progression of cinematographic parameters length, light, color). Or style may be seen as equal.; tance to the syuzhet. Burch has suggested the posslj; "cellular" form analogous to that in serial music, Wj single structure dictates both local texture and lart form. This might seem to resemble the "generative' of narration associated with the later films of Robbe-Gi As Robbe-Grillet explains: "UEden et aprěs (1970)is less the only fiction film—or in any case the first one—j the story itself is produced by the organization of themej successive series according to a system that is som« comparable to that of Schoenberg in music. "*'.Butm.Rjj Grillet's films these themes are only motifs, such-a* or colors, or abstractions, such as "opposition." Théffl give rise to syuzhet patterning, but as Roy Annt they determine nothing about stylistic configuratio more truly generative account of parametric nárŕ3 Burch's description of Plan Time as possessing a "0 dialectic between gags centered in the shot ancjjaj
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"bad" position—which generates the overall structure of the ilm's sequences as well."1 Kristin Thompson's analysis of Twin the Terrible shows how a basic opposition controls both .the syuzhet structure and the stylistic patterning." In lier work on Les vacances ilr M. Hulot, Thompson demonstrates that a very Robbe-Grilleiian variation among sequences (the various routines of a vacation week) proceeds from the same "cell" as do the manipulations of film technique.0
Even if syuzhet and style do not issue from a single don-nee, they can function as equals. In Dreyer's Ordet, repeated camera movements across a parlor create a systematic scanning independent of local narrative needs; the camera will track only with characters "going its way," able to assist its achievement of a global nonnarrative pattern. Late in the film, when a group of mourners has assembled in the parlor, the camera punctiliously surveys the space, tracking right and then back left with a striking lack of economy. Stylistically, this is another variant on the to-and-fro movements of earlier scenes. Yet in iis summative quality the shot signals the exhaustion of this locale (we will not see it again) and prepares not only for a shift in style but for narrative closure." Style indubitably comes forward, but it functions to mark both its own functioning and syuzhet patterns. In what Burch calls "a fully composite work," stylistic structures "retain their autonomous, 'abstract' function, but in svmbiosis with the plot which they both support and challenge. ""T
In most parametrie.illy narrated films, syuzhet and fabula shift in importance. This is not surprising. An analogous situation occurs in opera: The story action needs to continue, but the music needs to repeat. Hence the levels alternate in significance. In parametric narration, style will sometimes accompany the syuzhet. reinforcing it. For example. N ana's conversation with Btve Parain in Vivre sa vie is handled in conventional shot reverse-shot fashion, which makes syuzhet construction dominant. At other times, parametric narration will subordinate the syuzhet to stylistic structures, as in the back-io-the-\ v.mera sequence of Vivre sa vie. When this occurs, the constant potential tension between style and syuzhet can manifest itself—as it does often in Vivre sa vie.
whose "gratuitous" survey of paradigmatic options frustates our fabula-constructing activity. Burch describes this alternating process as "a dialectical rhythm that sometimes joins and sometimes separates what used to be called form and content."0*
Note, however, that even when the syuzhet comes forward, it lends to do so on the style's own terms. Once the intrinsic stylistic norm has established itself, the syuzhet is grasped and the fabula constructed within the constraints of that norm. For instance, after Katzelmacher's combinatory patterning becomes apparent as a stylistic principle, we can take it for granted, and the syuzhet becomes easier to assimilate. And even the relative downplaying of style in Vivre sa vie's scene with Brice Parain is achieved within the framework of a string of codified alternatives.
The parametric syuzhet will thus tend to be recognizable by its deformities. One symptom is an abnormal elliptical i ty. Causes and effects may be disjoined, major scenes may be omitted, duration may be skipped over. M is one example, but Katzelmacher and Vivre sa vie are better ones. Each has an episodic construction that yields only glimpses of character psychology and presents unmarked excerpts from an indeterminate fabula duration. A contrary symptom is an abnormal repetiveness, such as that in Dreyer's Ordet and Gertrud. Here the syuzhet is telling us too little too often, flattening big scenes and trivial gestures to the same level. Some filmmakers are notable for using both tactics. The films of Ozu and Bresson manage to be both elliptical (omitting big scenes, hailing a scene before its climax, suddenly switching locale, not marking duration) and repetitious (reiterating trivial linking actions in Bresson, locales in Ozu). Both severe ellipticality and repetition indicate that the constraints of stylistic patterning are imposing their will on the syuzhet, or at least lhat the narration limits itself to presenting events that display the style to best advantage.
To sum up: Parametric narration establishes a distinctive intrinsic norm, often involving an unusally limited range of stylistic options. It develops [his norm in additive fashion. Style thus enters into shifting relations, dominant or subordinate, with the syuzhet. The spectator is cued to
PARAMETRIC   N A K R A T1 Ü N
construct a prominent stylistic norm, recognizing style as "motivated neither realistically nor compositional])' nor trans-. textually. The viewer must also form assumptions and hypotheses about the stylistic development of the film.
The strategy of treating the stylistic pattern as a rigorous but additive set of differences laid over the syuzhet does challenge our normal processes of perceiving a film narrative. In particular, it thwarts the chief method of managing viewing time—constructing a linear fabula. The parametric film battles against time, carrying to an extreme the tendency toward "spatialization" which we observed in historical-materialist narration. This is very evident in Kať zelmacker and in Ozu's films, in which stylistic repetition encourages the viewer to "stack" scenes by technique, in opposition to the horizontal unrolling of the action. This mode strains so vigorously against habitual capacities that it risks boring or baffling the spectator., yjvre so. vie or Katzel-tnacher can be treated as art films by critics who neglect the workings of style. Because of the complex and inherently open nature of stylistic construction in such films, a viewer may move quickly to connotative interpretation and miss the parametric play.
Here we can locate the more general effects of a mode whose structures may be invisible but still "registered'* in the sense remarked by Burch and Boulez. It is significant that the most celebrated exponents of the sparse parametric strategy—Dreyer. Ozu. Mizoguchi, and Bresson—are often seen as creating mysterious and mystical films. It is as if a self-sustaining style evokes, on its edges, elusive phantoms of connotation, as the viewer tries out one signification after another on the impassive structure. The recognition of order triggers a search for meaning. Noncinematic schemata, often religious ones, may thus be brought in to motivate the workings of style. It is possible to recuperate these films in art-cinema terms, invoking subjectivity or authorial commentary to explain isolated stylistic events. But one reason to hold onto the possibility of parametric narration is that it points up the limits upon the art film's extrinsic norms-limits, we have seen, of insipidity and banality—and lets us acknowledge a richness of texture that resists interpretation.
The Parameters of Pickpocket
Michel takes up a life of theft, while his friend_sjacq Jeanne and a police inspector try to dissuade him being captured, he flees Paris and returns two year Jeanne now has a child and has been abandoned by Ja the father. Michel offers to take care of them. He and gives Jeanne money. Tempted to return to pi ets, he succumbs and is arrested. Jeanne visits him i where they declare their love for one another.
Such an emaciated outline of Pickpocket's story; suggest the rich play of syuzhet and style in the i activity of the film. This process gets set in motion film's first frame. There is initially a prologue, a crai a black ground while a Lully piece swells up on the; track.
The style of this film is not that of a thriller The author attempts to explain, in pictures and s§
the nightmare of a young man. forced by his
ness into an adventure in theft for which he
made. Yet this adventure, by strange paths, brings tog
two souls who otherwise might never have kno
one another.
And within this extradiegetic frame there is a rečou» the story world. After the credits, a hand writes in while a voice (later to be identified as Michel's) text. The first entry follows the prologue.
i know that normally those who have done thes keep quiet, while those who talk have not done And yet I have done them.
We could not ask for a more blatant signal of th between syuzhet and style: Michel's hand and the things he has done, an omniscient auihori announcing that these events will be "explained" in and sounds. There is much to be said about this barreled opening, but let us first consider the relation to the fabula in the film as a whole.
There are two lines of siory action: the relation of Michel to .his mother and to his friends Jacques and Jeanne; and Michel's pickpocket career. In syuzhel presentation, these two lines are initially linked by the actions of various characters. Jacques tries to find Michel a job so that he won't steal, while the inspector steps into Michel's life, apparently to warn him olT. But not until the inspector visits Michel does the fundamental causal connection emerge. The inspector announces that a year previously Michel's mother had reported a robbery and then sent Jeanne to withdraw the complaint. Thus the police have suspected Michel of being a thief all along, and his personal life has been bound up with the investigation from the start. The Russian Formalists would here point out that the protagonist, far from being a creature with great psychological depth, is constructed as the point of intersection of two lines of material, becoming the splice between domesticity and petty crime." This conclusion gains some weight when, in the next scene, Michel comes as close as he ever does to naming the cause of his actions. "1 couldn't achieve anything," he says. "It drove me mad." If this is the weakness mentioned in the film's prologue, it is explained in fairly perfunctory fashion. What did he try to achieve? And why theft rather than other acts? The film does not posit psychological ambiguity, as in art-cinema narration, but opacity.
" The syuzhel also brings out certain temporal patterns. Here is an outline of the fabula.
A.  Michel's mother reports the robber)' to police.
B.  A month later: Michel robs the woman at the racetrack.
C.  Over the next eleven months: Michel meets Jeanne, his mother dies, and he becomes a professional thief. He flees to England.
D.  Over the next two years, Michel stays in England.
E.   He returns to Paris.
F.  Over one or two weeks: He works to support Jeanne and her child. He is arrested at the racetrack.
G.  Over several weeks: He is in prison.
The syuzhet manipulates our construction of this fabula py starting (like Michel's written account) in medias res.
wi;h i ľ. ■. the racetrack robbery. [Tie lirsl three-fifths oi the film are concerned with the eleven-month series of events in (C). Near the end of this section. Michel learns of event A, his mother's report to the police, and it is only then recounted to us. The syuzhet goes on to render the sojourn in England (D) by a single laconic journal entry, thus letting two years elude dramatization. The rest of the film dramatizes events in (E), (F), and (G). There are, however, equivocations. Within the fabula world, it is hard to tell how much time elapses, chiefly because the seasons seem constant and Michel wears an unvarying costume. In La guerre estfinie, Diego wears the same suit throughout the film, but there costuming functions as a cue for a short syuzhet duration. Here the same device renders fabula and syuzhet duration vague.
The syuzhet goes further in marking its manipulation of the fabula. Story events are buckled into loops. The first scene shows Michel stealing at Longchamps racetrack; three years later he is caught in the same locale. After his capture, a series of scenes in prison, itself symmetrically constructed, forms a pendant to the main syuzhet action. Retardation is also flagrantly present. As Roy Armes has pointed out, "The whole film is ultimately a vast temps morty a delour that takes in exile and imprisonment for [Michel] and abandonment and an illegitimate pregnancy for Jeanne, only to bring the two of them back to a love they could have enjoyed to begin with."7" From Ulis standpoint, Jacques, the inspector, and the entire adventure in crime constitute an extensive series of realistically motivated delays in the consummation of the couple's relations. When the inspector objects to Michel's belief in superior thieves on the grounds that these men would not stop stealing, his remark prophesies Michel's persistence in folly and at the same time justifies the inclusion of more robber)1 scenes. Indeed, the acts of theft are remarkably "dysfunctional." concentrating upon Michel's progress toward self-sufficient virtuosity, with no concomitant effects on his altitudes. Similarly, the encounters which Michel has with Jacques and Jeanne are highly repetitious and contribute little to any linear development. The retardation is laid bare in the prologue, with its warning
PARAMETRIC  NARRATION
thai "strange paths" will eventually unite two souls. This is quite analogous to Shklovsky's example of Tristram Shandy, in which the narrator graphs jhe hook's digressive syuzhet as a knot of squiggles and whorls.7'''
In most respects, the syuzhet reflects the constraints of Michel's written text. We are confined almost completely to his range of knowledge at the moment when the story events occurred. Indeed, the diegetic recounting in the notebook does not as rule fill irf prior information or anticipate events. And the device of the written record enables Michel to explain his feelings and thoughts. In thirty-six of the forty-nine sequences, his voice will interject a report of his mental state. There is thus some "subjective" depth on the sound track to compensate for the notable impassivity of face and demeanor. Ellipses are also subjectively motivated by the recounting. When Michel goes abroad, his notebook summarizes the hiatus with two sentences, and we never see him in England. On either side of this gap there is also a revealing asymmetry. He rides to the station in a cab, tensely expecting pursuit and arrest. Upon his return, however, we dissolve from the railroad station to him climbing a flight of stairs. Why no shot of him driving from the station to the apartment? "I was there again," the commentary explains, "without knowing how."
In a classical film, technique would faithfully reflect the syuzhet's degree of communicativeness and its limited range and depth of knowledge. But this film's prologue announces the overt presence of an omniscient narration which will operate through style. The crawl tide ('The style of this film is not that of a thriller ..." and so on) is highly self-conscious, emphasizing the spectator as someone in a theater to whom pictures and sounds can be explicidy addressed by an "author." Here is a case where the narra-tional process mimics a communication from sender to receiver. (See p. 62.) It is significant that the credit sequence follows the prologue, as if identifying Bresson the filmmaker with the self-nominated source of images and sounds. Furthermore, the prologue claims absolute knowledge of distant origins (Michel "was not made" for theft), immediate m mp* Che has a "weakness"), psychological reactions, vari-
ous events along the way, and the eventual outcome! narration also proposes particular schemata to try on film. We are to watch for theft, for the motivation ibractf and for digressive developments that will eventually^ two characters. This prologue is also more communis? than its Hollywood counterpart, but it remains tan talia] obscure on certain points. What are the "strange paths Michel one of the two souls? Who is the other? Ce; explanations will be kept vague, such as the exact ivegffl that led Michel into thievery. By such gaps and equí? tions. the narration maintains an overt uncommunicál ness that provokes our curiosity about how the predj events will occur.
From the start, Michel's diegetic writing and voiceg commentary are at die mercy of the extradiegetic voice! master of "pictures and sounds" chooses to start at a p well along in Michel's text. A bit of the preceding paran (dans la rue...) can be seen. Did il recount his theft! his mother a month before? We will never know. NorWu learn the context of Michel's act of recounting. Is thisafl addressed to himself? Is it a confession to the police?'B letter to Jeanne? (Compare the relatively explicit definj of the narrating circumstances in Murder My Sweem cussed on pp. 66-67.) By "o1 revealing Michel's recount in its entirety, the overarching narration cuts it'll immediate fabula causality and makes it a self-cojjsj address to the audience. (This will lead to a crucial equiü tion at the very end.) Furthermore. Michel's writiriOT clearly located with respect to the events it recounts:! long afterward does it take place? The narrating situám never defined as it is in, say. Kind Hearts and Corm Indeed, at the film's close we do not return to Mltn written record at all—another; indication of the pora extradiegetic narration to curtail syuzhet information!
Narration in Pickpocket would be highly self-conscioj virtue of the striking syuzhet handling alone, bul syuzhet is in turn subjected to an internally organized« metric system, preformed and defined wji oil y in tenffl £iňemáGč~špace and time. Using a "sparse approacH film selects only a few technical procedures from the«
cal paradigm. These devices become organized into an additive, spatialized form that coheres as a unique stylistic world. Pickpocket's intrinsic norm thus achieves prominence by virtue of its narrow range of technical choices, its quantitative repetition of those, and its qualitative subordination of Michel's recounting to stylistic patterning. The crawl title defines the work's prominence immediately: "The style of this film is not that of a thriller." Thereafter the narration literally stylizes jlje represented events; images and sounds stand like translucent filters between the syuzhet organization and the spectator.
r The work on film style begins with the organization of the profilmic event itself. Although shot on location. Pickpocket is hardly "realistic." The manipulation of the sound track owes nothing to classical verisimilitude. No metro platfroms ever sounded so quiet; in these bank lobbies and train stations you can hear ever)' rustle of banknotes, each footfall. The figures' behavior is equally stylized. After Jeanne and Jacques return to a cafe table where Michel had been sit ting, they sit down, pause, and only then does Jacques lift his eyes and remark that Michel is gone. In the bank. Michel blocks the exit of a businessman by simply stepping up to him; the two hold their postures for a long moment before they separate. Such abstraction of figure movement is at its height during the pickpocket scenes. These passages are not the plausible representations of efficient thievery which classical cinema would present. Victims stand unnaturally still and let strangers grasp their wrists or lapels with impunity. When Kassagi steals Írom a man about to take a cab, the gull must halt motionless and silent before climbing in. At the racetrack, there is an unnatural divorce between the rigid position of Michel's body (in frontal shots) and the flexible mobility of an arm creeping toward a purse or pocket. (See figs. 12.5-12.6.) The stylization of the profilmic event includes costumes as well. Black suits mask off chunks of Space and allow diving hands to stand oul against a neutral ground. Perhaps the most outrageous example is Michel's outfit, his rumpled dark suit and his loosened tie that is usually skewed a constant angle. One function of the unvarying costumes, as I have mentioned, is to create uncertainly about duration. But Michel's suit also acts as a uni-
12.6
form, so that we can always pick him out of a crowd or identify him in a frontal midriff shot. Michel's suit and tie could stand as emblems of the extent to which rigorous and restricted regularities ofmise-en-scěne bear ihe trace of an all-powerful parametric system.
PARAMETRIC  NARRATION
13.7
A comparable restraint operates in the choice of framing and cutting patterns. Bresson restricts his camera to a straight-on or a slightly high angle, most typically in medium-shot or medium-close-up range, and lie uses only a 50-mm lens. He relies upon eyeline matches and shot/reverse-shot combinations. The recurrent devices derive from the paradigm characteristic of classical Hollywood narration. Yet in Bresson's films devices gain great prominence with respect to the classical norm, for several reasons. First, Bresson typically does not employ other classical devices, such as the establishing long shot, the low-angle framing, match-on-action cuts, or analytical editing. Certain devices thus get pried loose from their codified role and move forward as pure parameters. Second, there is the matter of timing. In a classical film, the completion of the glance determines the moment of an eyeline-match cut, as we saw in Rear Window. Jeff looks, we see what he sees, then we see Jeff reacting. In Pickpocket, though, the cut will be delayed. In a favorite variant, a figure will look, lower the eyes, look again, lower the eyes again, then finally raise them; only then will we see the object of the glance. A slower timing is also created by having characters leave a shot and then
holding the empty framing for a noticeable intei cutting away. With. Bresson, jhe^nrge to "cover" movement by the slight lag in cutting away that we. William deMille and Lubitsch (pp. 171, 182) beet palpable emphasis on vacant space. The same prolong of what Hollywood would accelerate occurs in com scenes. In a Hollywood dialogue, the pace is often by cutting to the listener before the speaker has jji line. Bresson instead makes his speaker pause al'tc line, so that the cut to a reverse angle never i:■; dialogue. This simple device (also used by Ozl£ cut slightly more apparent than when continuous smoothes it over.; Bresson thus "defamiliarizes"" découpage by prolonging what leads into and oüf rrom^
All these parameters of sound, mise-en-scěnil and cutting break sharply from the realistic and ct tional motivation codified by classical norms. As a res relation of syuzhet and style becomes more d\ Syuzhet patterning comes forward at various points the style is most impalpable, such as the opening 1 scene, in which Michel's first theft is represented, tj point-of-view shots and close-ups of details. At 1 the syuzhet and style become more or less equiv| interest. The best examples of the latter are the film's.! shot/reverse-shot scenes.
As a classical figure of style, the shot/reverse shotiš gřaspable and thus well suited for the neutral trans? of story information. The device is easy to motivate^ tionally; each cut shows each character as she or he But in Bresson's hands the device gains anew emj have already seen how the general tendency to omj| lishing shots gives more prominence to other décc devices. A Bresson scene will typically start in one; ways. The camera may frame a detail which will" situated in a wider locale (by camera movement c movement).7' Or the scene will start with a character^! ing a space which is defined as contiguous to th by another character; the relation of the char/act fined through glances and/or portions of a body jr into the shot. Once the scene has begun, it.tei
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analyzed—or. rather, processed—by a ruthless shot/reverse-shot technique. For example, when Michel first goes to the cafe, a panning long shot follows his scanning of the crowd forJacques(fig. 12.7). Michel enters the cafe. Dissolve to the two of them at the bar, seen from the outset in a shot/
reverse-shot configuration (figs. 12.8-12.9). ^leT several exact repetitions of these setups. Michel notices the inspector offscreen and walks to him; the inspector comes into the frame and creates a new over-the-shoulder composition (fig. 12.10). Dissolve again as the three men go to a table and sit.
creating another over-the-shoulder setup (fig. 12.11). They talk, and there follows a shot/reverse-shot passage of only four setups, two of which (figs. 12.12-12.13) are presented eight times apiece. After another dissolve, Michel and 1«-------------„ ,„ ,\,a ,-afo fiivir and talk, This initiates a brief
shot/reverse-shot   sequence   (figs.   12.14-12.15) befjra Michel drifts off into the night (fig. 12.16; cf. fig. 12.7; three brief scenes are unusual by virtue of their r variety: no variation of camera angle or distance shot/reverse-shot stretch and nearly none between tjl
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exchanges between Michel and Jacques (figs. 12.8-12.9. 12.j4-12.15); no figure movement that would change the relative positions of the interlocutors. Striking also is the "preformed" nature of the découpage, whereby characters move into position for the shot/reverse-shot combination. a9
'if figure behavior and camera position secretly collaborated to fulfill an abstract stylistic formula. With the establishing shot virtually abolished, the very first shot in a character encounter must become the first phase of a shot/reverse-shot exchange.
But you can soe I have no job
The sense of characters moving to fulfill a preordained découpage is even stronger in the remarkable scene ir which Michel visits Jeanne to ask about the police investigation. Their talk is presented in twenty-eight reverse shots. w<™ th» rpnpriiion is nuanced in that a shot will start to
develop in a way that varies slightly from the norm, point, Michel begins to pace, turning from Jeann^ 12.17). and me camera follows him by tracking 12.18). He turns to her and walks back (fig. 12.19). š camera tracks back to its initial position over Jeanne's
Í3.2J
der (fig. 12.20). She replies to him in a reverse shot. Cut to a repetition of the earlier setup, and track in again as Michel once more moves lo the window (figs. 12.21-12.22). He turns and comes forward again, but now her shoulder is not in the frame (fig. 12.23). Tlie shifting distance between the characters is measured by a precise decoupage: one step makes a "just noticeable" compositional difference. Later in the scene, when Michel asks her if she thinks he is a thief, she retreats out of the frame, he takes one step forward, and the camera tracks back far enough to reposition her shoulder exactly as at the outset (fig. 12.24). Thus, repetitions and minute variations reveal powerful but simple rules of framing and cutting which figure movement must obey, beyond the dictates of the syuzhet. Unlike .Soviet historical-materialist narration, which often withholds spatial cues entirely. Pickpocket's narration reorients us hyper-redun-dantly through a very narrow range of cues.
In the shot/reverse-shot scenes, stylistic rigor and syuzhet development operate as equals. In other passages, stylistic devices and patterns subordinale, even deform, syuzhet operations. At the ver>' start, the extradiegetic narration declared itself to be an explanation "in pictures and sounds":
I*. -3
cinematic style may take charge of the syuzhet. The tendency is apparent at a very local level. The first shot of the first scene of story action is a close-up: a woman's gloved hands take bills out of a purse and pass them 10 the hands of a man. One aspect of the stylistic norm, the close-up of hands, is thus supplied at the outset. Later, a scene may begin in an apparently comparable way but then go on to disorient us. Michel watches a theft on the subway. The scene ends with a close-up of the thiefs hand as it grasps a newspaper in which a wallet has been nestled. Dissolve to a close-up of a hand sliding a notebook out from a creased newspaper. But this hand belongs to a different thief: a track back reveals Michel at home practicing the feat. Similarly, when Kassagi instructs Michel in picking pockets, we get a dissolved "montage sequence" of hands executing moves. We cannot tell if these all take place in a single evening's session or if they are excerpted from many days or weeks. A shot of Michel flexing his fingers on a table's edge retrospectively becomes at once the last shot of the montage and the first shot of a new scene. Unlike the narrative "hooks" between scenes in classical films, here Bresson creates purely visual and sonic linkages that make syuzhet relations equivocal.
.
;he syuzhet. The ten-
1. The first shot of the
up: a woman's gloved
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PARAMETRIC  NARRATION
At a broader level, the sparse techniques become palpable
through development of a richly spatialized form. A simple
example is offered by the portrayal of "insignificant." often
routine story actions. In shot 22. Michel enters his apart-
. u. .;Ui„„ 0„h ipavp« rhe frame (fig. 12.25). Cut to a shot
of the top of the stairs; Michel passes through, walking (fig. 12.26). In shot 24, we see the door of his room stanc ajar, and he enters (fig. 12.27). The spatial gaps here \n\ us to imagine Michel starting at the foot of the staircase l absent shot between shots 22 and 23). arriving at his
[ :he syuzhet. The ten-.1. The first shot of the up: a woman's gloved i them to the hands of a the close-up of hands, scene may begin in an . go on to disorient us. /. The scene ends with grasps a newspaper in solve to a close-up of a "eased newspaper. But f: a track back reveals imilariy, when Kassagi s, we get a dissolved áng moves. We cannot evening's session or if $ or weeks. A shot of s edge retrospectively montage and the first alive "hooks" between n creates purely visual et relations equivocal.
PARAMETRIC  NARRATION
At a broader level, the sparse techniques become palpable
through development of a richly spatialized form. A simple
example is offered by the portrayal of "insignificant," often
routine story actions. In shot 22, Michel enters his apart-
t u..iwin„ ^„A lpavpq the frame (fifi. 12.25). Cut to a shot
of the top of the stairs; Michel passes through, walking uj (fig. 12.26). In shot 24, we see the door of his room standim ajar, and he enters (fig. 12.27). The spatial gaps herein^ us to imagine Michel starting at the foot of the staircasgj absent shot between shots 22 and 23). arriving at his
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ing. and walking down ihe hall to his room (two shots to be inserted between shots 23 and 24). Later in the film we get to see the first flight of stairs, when Michel stands looking out at Kassagi (fig. 12.28). Still later do we see him walk down the hallway outside his door (fig. 12.29). The trivial process
of Michel's coming and going has been broken up into several bits, and all of them are never present in any one sequence. The narration plays a remarkable series of variants on these simple elements and even extends the handling to other locales. The first time Michel visits his mother, we start with a shot of him leaving the front doorway (fig. 12.30) and cut to a shot of him climbing the stair (fig. 12.31). very much as we have seen in the earlier scene. Behind all these "surface" manifestations there lurks an absent structure, a "shot row" which, like the series in music, can only be inferred.
These examples also suggest how the "spatialized" tendency of the narration emerges through unusual regularities of stylistic handling. However classical the sources of Pickpocket's parametric operations, through rigorous repetition those procedures form a closed system unique to this film. Now, every' narration requires repetitions in order to reinforce spectators assumptions and (0 signal the intrinsic norms that will govern the work. Normally, however, stylistic repetitions operate to emphasize syuzhet informational processes without calling attention to style as such. Consider, for instance, the reiterated camera setups in the sequence from Miss Lulu Bett analyzed back in Chapter 9. The repetition of orientation and framing sinks below awareness because our perception is geared to noticing significant changes in the characters' behavior—expression, gesture, or dialogue. But by Bresson's famous tactic of expressionless performance. Pickpocket deprives the shot of much informational content.. When each character wears a blank face and stands motionless or walks without idiosyncrasy, the repetitions of camera setup come forward to a greater degree. It is not just that 36 percent Of the shots in Pickpocket repeat earlier setups in the scene, for a classical film might have an even higher degree of spatial redundancy. (In Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, one out of every two shots repeats a setup.) In a classical film, repeated camera setups serve as a neutral ground for changes in the human agents. In Pick- i pocket, the neutrality of performance makes the repetition of ! camera position part of the film's intrinsic norm.
The "preformed" quality of framing, cutting, and figure movement becomes most prominent across scenes, when
repetitions and variations of prior camera setups create a strong sense of a style that reduces every event to the same coordinates. Sometimes the symmetries are in neighboring -u«»0 ic when we see Michel descend to the metro platform
train and walk up the opposite stairs. A similar effect! ceeds from the graphically matched dissolves to nej pers, hands, door frames, and so forth. More powerful« far-reaching parallels. Each time Michel visits his mot
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On the second and third occasions that Michel meets Jacques at their cafe, shot/reverse-shot series are played out in terms very close to the first one(figs. 12.32-12.33; cf. figs. 12.14-12.15). On his third visit to the cafe, he talks with the inspector, in a series that recalls the first occasion (figs.
12.34-12.35; cf. figs. 12.12-12.13). Michel's two visits to the inspector's office are rendered in strikingly similar reverse shots, and Michel's visit lo Jeanne, discussed above, is an echo of their first meeting on the landing outside his mother's room. The repetition becomes dizzying in those
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12.41
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>. Michel's two visits to
in strikingly similar re-
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the landing outside his
oblique shots of the hall outside Michel's apartment: when Jeanne and Jacques visit (fig. 12.36), when Michel and Jeanne arrive after his mother's death (fig. 12.37). when Michel enters to meet Jacques (fig. 12.38), when Jacques and Michel go to meet Jeanne (fig. 12.39), when Michel
teases Jacques into leaving (fig. 12.40). and goes to interrogate Jeanne (fig. 12.41). Ano would vary our views of this locale far more, The narration usually lingers on the hallway after have gone only augments the tendency of thgs register as nearly identical variants of a sin
The hand that writes in the notebook im suggested, that we will be restricted to Midi depth of knowledge in spelling out the syuz narration of images and sounds creates a f restrictions on our knowledge, somewhat a sheerly stylistic constraints on knowledge whi Jancsó's long takes in The Confrontation. T itself to those syuzhet acts it can "process limits and with regard to its own patterns. formulaically edited exchanges, the narration tain other activities, such as striding across a.rooni cafe scenes, for instance. Michel is never shown wal the bar; the film regularly omits this slight action! remarkable point, a dissolve skips over only a few sej just enough to move the inspector, Jacques, an from one shot/reverse-shot passage at the bar to anot at a table. The syuzhet might have rendered Mkhel's the man's watch at the carnival in intensely su terms, but the style diverges from the terms of th recounting: Michel leaves the frame, and the c ■ on the empty table. Later we will leani that he h . fallen, scraping his hand. It is as if such a mel action cannot be sufficiently transformed by the s omitted. The most flagrant example of the s is Michel's trip abroad. The elision is partially jus syuzhet tactic: Michel's passage in his notebook s rizes the hiatus in two sentences. But the style proc ellipsis in a thoroughly characteristic manner. In Michel leaves his apartment house. In scene 39, aft boarded the train, the camera pans left with the tr. pulls away. Dissolve to his hand writing in his Dissolve to the train platform two years later, and with Michel walking through the crowd. Dissolve toil him climbing a staircase (fig. 12.42), in a training that
11.30 1237
12.42
up the whole sel of sucli shots earlier in the film (e.g., figs. 12.25-12.29). The syuzhet has not followed him to England, and the style has treated his departure and return just as symmetrically and repetitively as it had treated his life in Paris. We come at last, and again. 10 the problem of perceptibility. How does Pickpocket's narration engage the spectator by pieans of processes characteristic of parametric cinema? As usual, the initial portions of the film establish the intrinsic norm. The prologue, the credits, and the hand writing emphasize narrational authority and the calculated play between extradiegetic and diegetic factors. The first ordinary scene, in which Michel steals from a woman's purse and then is quickly captured by the police, sets out several stylistic features: the close-up of hands, the repetition of setups, the use of Michel's optical point of view, the sparse sound track, the impassive figure behavior, and so on. 1 would argue, though, that the style does not dominate syuzhet patterning in this or in other early scenes. The style is nei-. (her as obtrusive nor as equivocal as it will later become. Rather, it is somewhat suited for the scene, and the fabula action is presented with sufficient suspc-nse to make syuzhet
construction the primary interest. Gradually the stylistic rules begin to assert themselves. Michel returns home in the spatially "gapped" fashion we have already considered (figs. 12.25-12.27). He visits Jacques in the cafe, and the scene's symmetries, both of shot/reverse shot (figs. 12.8-12.15) and of scenic construction, begin to emerge. The parametric system becomes apparent, however, only after the syuzhet starts to recycle itself.
' After the prologue and the shot of the hand writing, the first five segments constitute a condensed phase within Michel's life. He commits the theft at Longchamps. is taken to the police station, is interrogated and freed, returns to his room, visits his mother and speaks with Jeanne, and meets Jacques at the cafe. These sequences introduce all the major characters and locales and establish a rhythm of theft/interrogation/encounter that will be repeated throughout the film. After Michel leaves the cafe, he goes to the metro, where he spies a pickpocket at work. We are back to the theft phase. As Leonard Meyer notes, "Immediate repetition lends to emphasize the differences between like events, while remote repetition—that is, return—tends to call attention to their similarities. "TJ Soon the viewer is able to assume that a narrow set of parallel syuzhet units is at work. There are scenes of Michel alone, practicing in his room or on the street. There are scenes of Michel's encounters with Jacques and Jeanne, at a cafe or in Michel's room. There are the discussions with the inspector, again at the cafe or in his room. There are also scenes of tutelage, either by the anonymous pickpocket on the metro or by Kassagi later. We can also predict the outcome of most of these, scenes: Michel will try to increase his. virtuosity; he will bait the inspector and remain unrepentant; in- any, encounter with Jacques or Jeanne he will probably rebuff them and leave abruptly. And in general the stylistic handling comes to be taken for granted: shot/reverse, shot for character confrontation, sud-aen transitions on details, interjections of the voice-over, and so on. The overall repetition of syuzhet modules, the combinations of relatively fixed character relations, and the narrow range of stylistic variation create very firm assumptions and hypotheses.
In this context the pickpocket scenes stand out vividly. They are much less predictable, involving the greatest variety of locales, characters, objects, and methods. Miche) goes solo in the metro; then he is, unexpectedly, nabbeďby a victim; he acts in partnership with Kassagi outside the bank; solo, he lifts men's watches in the street; he works as part of a trio at the train station; solo again, he is caught at the racetrack. Stylistically too the pickpocket scenes are more varied^ though always within the sparse norm established at the outset. We get almost abstract close-ups of hands roaming against black suits, complex camera movements trailing victims' torsos, cutting that severs arms from bodies, and almost complete silence. In context, the pickpocket scenes gather their excitement from such nuances of handling as the fact that now the shots no longer hold on empty frames— a "minimal" means of picking up pace. If the film did not break its cyclical repetition ofset units with the more unpredictable and comparatively spectacular pickpocket scenes, it would be closer to the monodic construction of Bresson's later Proces de Jeanne d'Arc (1961).
It is necessary for the narration to geometricize syuzhet patterning in predictable ways to establish the unity of style and to prompt the viewer to perceive repetitions, disjunctions, and differences in parametric handling. By virtue of all the stylistic regularities considered above, various cafes and rooms become extensions of the same rudimentary locales. Uncertainty about when a scene ends is created by such stylistic play as dissolving in the middle of a dialogue or action or holding on an empty space once a character has exited. The narration can create unwarranted stylistic hypotheses by using such tactics as misleading transitions from one close-up to another. The spectator must also notice how far the style will go in its ruthless processing of the syuzhet. To create the intermittent dominance of style over syuzhet, the narration must generate firm expectations that in this film certain actions will be rendered only according to specific parameters organized as stylistic events, and that there will be some additive variation of them in the course of, the film.
Among other advantages, an analysis of parametric form
.helps, reveal the formal causes of that auraof .transcendence which viewers and critics com ute to Bresson's work. One source of this effect tic patterning is somewhat distinct from syuzhet In the 1960s art Cinema, stylistic^organization within schemata of objectivity, subjectivity, an commentary.. In La guerre est finie, the rhythmical! shots of Diego boarding trains create psychologic ity.   But in  parametric  narration,  the style accounted for by such schemata. The shots of parture from and return to Paris possess no subj the author makes no comment In parametric if syuzhet is subordinated to an.immanerj|Jmrj i tic pattern. Because no evident denotative me corning from such obvious patterning, the view move to the connotative level. Yet nothingvery
evident here either. When a powerful and intemallm tent Style refuses, conventional schemata for prod, narrative meaning, we are tantalized into projecting^ schemata onto it, and the flickering oscillation^ alternatives contributes to the sense of uncer'i without meaning tantalizes.
Without leisure to linger, the viewer may also ineffability to the ungraspable differences generated', style. The spectator cannot spot all the variance parameter and cannot keep them in mind all at on' minute variations of lighting or framing in recur!' (for instance, figs. 12.36-12.41) put too great attention and memory. Instead, the viewer sacriftc tions in individual parameters for a synoptic recc stylistic events: "This again!" To quote Meyer "What we perceive and respond to is not the order orris ity of individual parameters, but the pattern—or. pattern—which their combination creates. To put it a perceptual pattern is more than, and different fit sum of the parameters that create it."7' Slight differ among instances are not easily recognized. The l forgets, say, how many times a shot recurs, and sacrific ability to compare aspects of each occurrence. Thu narration strains against its materials and against ih.
ceptual norms of the cinema as we know it. More is put in than we can assimilate, even on repeated viewings. Like decorative art. parametric cinema exploits the very limits of the viewer's capacity.75 The sense of an order whose finest grain we can glimpse but not grasp helps produce the con-
noiative effects of which thematic criticism records the trace. These effects arise from a formal manipulation that is, in a strong sense, nonsignifying—closer to music than to the novel.
Pickpocket's stubborn resistance to interpretation, its preference for order over meaning, reappears in the final four segments. After a great many repetitions of the theft/ interrogation/encounter cycle, the film's major portion completes itself with a second visit to the racetrack. Enticed by a plainclothes policeman. Michel attempts to pick his pocket. Predictably, his.effort is rendered as a variant upon the first scene f compare figs. 12.43-12.44 and figs. 12.5-12.6). The last four scenes take place in prison and constitute a new cycle with its own symmetrical syuzhet structure. In scene 47, Michel leaves his cell and goes to the visitors' room to talk with Jeanne. In scene 48, he waits in his cell, but Jeanne does not return. In scene 49, he gets a letter from her announcing that she will come see him. In scene 50. Michel leaves his cell and goes to the visitors' room. Jeanne is there, and they embrace. As an obsessive itinerary of Michel's comings and goings, the scenes recapitulate in tiny compass his movement in earlier parts of the film. The same camera movement tracks Michel back from his bed and through the cell doorway in scene 47 and scene 50. The style also creates a negative symmetry in the two scenes of Jeanne's visit. In (47), he leaves his cell and we dissolve to him in the visitors' room; we never see him arrive, but we do see him leave. In (49X we see him leave his cell and arrive to stand before Jeanne, but we never see him leave the visitors' room. Bresson's "preformed" style goes still further, making the prison scenes exact extensions of earlier ones. The beginnings of the shots in his cell echo shots of Michel on his bed in his apartment. The encounters with Jeanne are handled in scrupulous shot/reverse shot like those earlier in the film (figs. 12.45-12.46; cf. figs. 12.17-12.24). Most remarkably, the prison corridor is filmed to resemble the hallway outside Michel's apartment (figs. 12.47-12.48; cf. figs. 12.36-12.41). The prison scenes thus summarize both syuzhet patterns and stylistic protocols.
The final scene continues the trend toward symmetries.
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12.46
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Michel and Jeanne face each other in a pair of reverse shots (figs. 12.49-12.50) barely different from prior ones. He presses the bars and she rises and conies to him (fig. 12.51). A shot/reverse-shot series (figs. 12.52-53) recalls their brief embrace In her apartment (figs. 12.54-12.55). As the Lully
itnusic starts, and while he kisses her forehead and she kill his hand, the camera tracks slowly forward to them (fl 12.56). In but one other scene has the camera trackeffl" juring a shot/reverse-shot exchange, and that w. is thoscen
' n Jeanne's apartment (figs. 12.17-12.23). Only in the.:
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text of such a sparse style can such a simple device and such a minute variation of an intrinsic norm take on such perceptual power.
The stylistic symmetries become even more significant in relation to the asymmetrical presentation of the framing
narration. The shot of the couple (fig. 12.56) is the film's last image. Since we never return to Michel's journal, our initial "frame" of his recounting is left incomplete. The shot we get forms a stronger stylistic coda than would a neutral shot of the hand writing. We do. however, hear Michel's voice: "O
1254
Jeanne, you." Sin« is heard, to her, tion ere*
:
12.56) is the film's last ieľs journal, our initial lpletc. The shot we get .vould a neutral shot of ipiir Michel's voice: "O
Jeanne, what a strange way 1 had to take in order to reach you." Since Jeanne's face blocks Michel's mouth as this line is heard, we cannot tell if it is a line of dialogue he murmurs to her. or the final voice-over commentary. Thus the narration creates a partial frame and a diegetic effect simul-
be lold have abolished ihe need for written commentary altogether. Which is to say that authorial presence was no more than a label for the shots, noises, voices, and music that gain their final effect as an impersonal stylistic system.
The Problem of Modernism
Throughout this book I have refrained from using the term "modernism." By spelling out the differences among various modes and norms, we can see that several different sorts of narration could qualify as "modernist." If we look to the traditions of twentieth-cen tury fiction and drama, running roughly from James. Proust, Joyce, and Kafka through Faulkner, Camus, and the Theater of the Absurd to Cortázar and Stoppard, we find that art-cinema narration could be called modernist; for these are among its important sources.Ä If we take modernism to be more closely allied with the experimental work of political artists like Grosz, Ussitzky, Heartfield. Brecht, and Tretyakov. then historical-materialist narration will be a better candidate for the label.77
52
And if we consider parametric narration as a distinct mode, its modernist pedigree can be traced back to the work of the Russian Formalists—a movement deeply involved with contemporary avant-garde poetry and fiction—and to the continental serialism and structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus parametric films might be considered modernist.7" The important difference is that we cannot posit any influence of such movements upon all parametric films. For reasons that have to be explained in each particular context, filmmakers in widely differing periods and cultures have utilized parametric principles. Some have done so consistently (Ozu, Bresson), others sporadically (Lang, Dreyer, Fassbinder. Godard). Whether we call this "modernism" is not as important as recognizing that only after an aesthetic was formulated explicitly was it possible for critics and spectators to construct an extrinsic norm that helps us grasp certain problematic films. Comprehension of films changes through time as we construct new schemata. In their ability to change our perspective on films both old and new. the norms of parametric narration epitomize the historicity of all viewing conventions.
v