posted on 2023-08-30, 17:01authored bySaminda Ranawaka
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s cinema is often seen as a classic nexus
between several generic categories: narrative, fiction, art cinema, auteur films. While
generic approaches pursue the potential traits and underlying structures that distinguish
one class from another, they also ingrain and idealise restrictive preconceptions. By
exploring Bergman’s formally and thematically related The Silence (1963) and the
prologue of Persona (1966), my research attests that generic approaches are seriously
inadequate to explain the multidimensionality of cinematic narrative.
In the first part of my study, I develop a three-tier analytical framework by
reviewing the key approaches to narrative and cinematic fiction. Considering the
insights of rhetorical narratology and C.S. Peirce’s sign theory, I also postulate
applicable theses for narrativity and fictionality in the cinematic context. The second
part of the study demonstrates that this nested narratological model offers an
illuminating approach to elaborate on how audiences exploit cinematic narrativity and
fictionality as communicational resources and acts. Instead of relying on the
predetermined macro-structures like syuzhet, plot, fabula, or story of Bergman’s
individual films, I explore micro-relations of Bergman’s cinema across the proposed
analytical tiers offering new readings of these canonical films.
Bergman’s cinema not only advances cinematic images, experiences, and their
references temporally with narrativity but also stratifies them across various levels with
cinematic fictionality. Thus, cinematic narrativity not only hinges on the diegetic tier (or
structural-story), but the extra-diegetic and thematic tiers also determine narrativity. The
immediate experience and discursive dynamics in Bergman’s cinema interweave
author, audience, actors, medium, themes, and other artworks into integrated textual
threads with fictional characters, events, and stories.
My study argues that cinematic narrative is not a predefined medium, component,
or structure, but a text-external communicational event that engenders multifarious
cinematic effects and signifying instances. As its original contribution to knowledge, I
elaborate cinematic narrativity and fictionality as referential dynamics as well as
communicational resources. These resources integrate immediate cinematic
experience as well as interpretive engagement for communicational goals. I also
maintain that my exploration helps to revisit the ambivalent takes on cinematic
authorship, communication, and fiction/reality dichotomy.
History
Institution
Anglia Ruskin University
File version
Accepted version
Language
eng
Thesis name
PhD
Thesis type
Doctoral
Legacy posted date
2020-03-09
Legacy creation date
2020-03-09
Legacy Faculty/School/Department
Theses from Anglia Ruskin University/Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences