Lost Highway#

190 Studying Contemporary American Film

a strict empiricism, because comprehension is not madę to depend upon a few basie surface units, or “cues/ which may be endlessly combined in strings through addition and subtraction’ (p. 112). For Branigan, schemata do not simply prime spectators to spot cues on the surface of a text. Morę fundamentally, they act as a cognitive frame or guiding procedurę that enables the spectator to transform data and create perceptual boundaries. The basie information is present in the data, but spectators need to shape, transform, and segment it. A spectator can completely transform a ‘text’ by perceiving it on a different level. Moreover, the levels of narration that Branigan outlines are not mutually exclusive; spectators can interpret the data in the film on several levels simultaneously; in terms of agents of narration, the data, when interpreted as a shot, can be attributed to several agents at once. This philosophical principle should become clearer in the following two sections.

6.5. Method

From Branigan’s theory of agents and levels of narration in chapter 4 of Narrative Comprehension and Film we can construct a typology of four types of shot:

1.    objective shots (not focused around the consciousness of any character within the film’s diegesis [the filnTs narrative world]; instead, it is a shot motivated by an agent outside the film’s diegesis - the narrator);

2.    externally focalized shots (shots focused, or focalized around a character’s awareness of diegetic events, such as over the shoulder shots; they do not represent the character’s experience, but their awareness);

3.    internally focalized shots (surface) - represent a character’s visual experience of diegetic events, as in point of view (POV) shots (that is, optical POV shots; when we cali a shot a POV shot in the following analysis, we mean an internally focalized shot (surface));

4.    internally focalized shots (deptłi) - represent a character’s internal events, such as dreams and hallucinations.

From this typology, the analyst is able to label and identify any shot in a narrative film in terms of the agents who control it and the level(s) on which it operates.

6.6. Analysis

For the purposes of this section I shall limit myself to the first half of the film, concentrating on the distinctive characteristic of Branigan’s theory and methodology - the various agents and levels of narration he outlines. The