We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
236 III. COMPOSITION
complete identification with a screen character in the fashion of the novel; all that it can do is to suggest intermittently what he sees and how he feels about it. In support of his thesis Souriau refers to Sacha Guitry's The Story of a Cheat, which is passed off as an autobiography told by the film's protagonist. He is certainly right in arguing that, except for the framing verbal statements and several arrangements involving only the intrigue, nothing in the film bears out the claim that the cheat, its hero, is identical with the narrator. The cheat is perceived from without like the rest of the cast; nor does the imagery strike one as a projection of his inner states of mind. Here as elsewhere, the role of the camera is that of an independent, if secret, witness.13
Again Souriau underestimates the potentialities of film. Even granted that the film maker is much less free than the novelist to become one with a character of his choice, he may go far in giving the impression of such mimetic transformations. Of course, Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake is anything but a case in point. In this film the camera simply substitutes for the eyes of the leading character, so that he himself remains almost invisible while his environment looks exactly the way it would appear from where he is standing or moving. The identity thus established is purely external; it does not permit us really to identify with that character. Yet the failure of the Montgomery picture to come to grips with the problem it poses should not lead one to infer that this problem is out of bounds for the medium.
Some films do tackle it with a measure of success. Take Caligari: true, the narrator of the Caligari story mingles in person with the other characters of the film, but even so we cannot help feeling that they are products of his imagination and that the bizarre world enveloping him as well as these phantoms emanates from the core of his self. The whole film seems to grow out of the narrator's interior life, reflecting in its light the universe it releases. Ueberfall accomplishes about the same in a more cinematic, less painterly spirit. Here too it is as if the sordid real-life streets, rooms, and underpasses that crowd the film were hallucinated by its panicky protagonist. All these shots converge toward his mind; in a manner of speaking his mind is the seat of the camera generating them. And does not Rashomon prevail upon the spectator to scrutinize the murder scene from the divergent viewpoints of the successive narrators? Whether he knows it or not, he is adopting their varying attitudes in the process.
Inwardness, then, is not entirely inaccessible to film either. This justifies the conclusion that, in general, the differences between the formal properties of film and novel are only differences in degrees. As such they carry less weight than the substantive similarities between the two media.