The cinematic Muthos

Abstract

The Greek word muthos names the role of the viewer or the reader in the process of recognizing a given narrative form or structure. It constitutes an active work of composition, integration and synthesis of heterogeneous elements and the establishment of a dynamic identity to the story being presented. It consists also of a sort of “negotiation” between the expected and the unexpected elements of a narrative, the foreseeable and the unforeseen. Through it, the reader or spectator is able to sustain and calibrate a level of expectation that explains for much of the narrative tension and the fruition provided by it. Not everything is predictable and not everything is unpredictable. The narrative structure provides the viewer or reader with a number of macro and micro ranges of possibilities and, therefore, with the chance to discriminate between the congruity and the incongruity of any diegetic sequence (i.e., the occurrence of events or reactions within those ranges and those which fall outside them). Film theorists have introduced and developed several surveying devices that help us to better grasp how this muthos takes place in the case of film viewing as well as to realize the different levels, both diegetic and perceptual, in which this activity takes place. These devices are, for instance, the relation between point-glance and point-object focal perspectives, the relation between music and emotion, erotetic narrative, the narrative enthymeme and the relation between reading-for-the-story and reading-within-the system. The objective of this paper is to propose a panoramic and comparative view of these explanatory devices and to present and assess their common rationale. All of them describe the way films are basically constructed through complex and juxtaposed sequences consisting on the instauration of a given range of possibilities and the cropping out or selection of one of those possibilities. Another common feature lies on the way these devices attribute the viewer an active role in the extraction, elaboration and development of cinematic meaning. Film viewing appeals constantly to the memory and activates different common cognitive abilities in the spectator, namely, our common methods of decision-making. I shall expand this view by proposing other ways through which movies exert a controlled appeal to the spectators’ cognitive capabilities and to their collaboration in filling in the gaps. I shall assume the hypothesis that the spectator’s more or less conscious awareness of her active role in film viewing could lead her – as Ernst Gombrich suggested in the case of painting -“to experience something of the ‘thrill of making’ ” and thus contribute to the explanation of the power of contemporary movies.