I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis Lizzie Nixon
Abstract (E): This article combines theories of cognition and empathy with focalization theory to examine how and why different forms of audience engagement in fictional worlds are cued. The article argues that critics should examine the differences between engagement that encourages audiences to apply their own frames to the world presented and type engagement cued by means of point-of-view shots and close-ups of facial expressions.
Abstract (F): Cet article combine les théories de la cognition et de l‟empathie avec la théorie de la focalisation afin d‟analyser comment et pourquoi certaines œuvres construisent la manière dont le public est invité à s‟investir dans des mondes fictionnels. Il défend l‟idée que les critiques devraient examiner avant tout les différences entre un type d‟investissement qui encourage les publics à appliquer leurs propres schémas de référence au monde de la fiction et un type d‟investissement qui passe surtout par des techniques de point de vue et de plans rapprochés d‟expressions faciles.
keywords: animation, autobiography, empathy, focalization, audience participation, rhetoric Article
This article will not attempt to give you the final word on focalization (who perceivesi) in an iron-clad nutshell. Nor will it explain, once and for all, the relationship between animation and autobiography. What it will do is put work on focalization, perspective and identification in film criticism and emotion theory together in a way that brings new life to the question of who can focalize which material and why, to quote James Phelan, it matters. Before revealing what will appear to be an unorthodox revision, I will provide some background for the focalization debate. In the 2001 collection New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, Phelan takes issue with the Gerald Prince/Seymour Chatman argument that narrators cannot be focalizers, suggesting that the position that “narrators cannot perceive the storyworld fails to explain their role in influencing the perceptions of narratees, implied audiences, and flesh and blood readers” (51). According to Phelan, the Prince/Chatman position that story/discourse must be separated at all costs has too high a cost with respect to understanding the complexity of narrator/character relations, especially with respect to autodiegetic accounts. I will go one further and argue that limiting the question of “who perceives” to characters, and even narrators, does not take invitations for reader/viewer perception into account and that the failure to examine these invitations can cause us to miss a piece‟s full rhetorical and affective effects. Marjane Satrapi‟s Persepolis, for example, an animated autobiography about growing up in revolutionary Iran and Vienna, involves viewers in several ways, inspiring empathy by focusing on close-ups of the face during emotional episodes (what Carl Plantinga has called the „scene of empathy‟) and also
93 through point-of-view shots. Persepolis also, however, uses an under-discussed and very different method of involving viewers in the storyworld: it strategically encourages viewer focalization of material unfocalized by anyone in the diegesisii. It is my hope that we can come to a fuller understanding of the ways in which reader/viewers are encouraged to immerse themselves in the storyworlds described by looking not only at how responses to characters are meant to resonate, but also how and why audiences are invited to project themselves into other worlds without filtering their experiences through those of the protagonists on screen.
In order to illustrate how my concept of the invitation to viewer focalization complements and differs from other accounts (I can hardly claim to be the only person to discuss reader/viewer perspective or response to focalization) let me briefly summarize other major research on reader/viewer focalization. David Herman (2009), Richard Gerrig (2001), David Miall and Don Kuiken (2001), Els Andringa (2001), and Mieke Bal (1977), have all researched perspective and reader response to focalization in different ways, with Bal claiming that internal focalization (where we have access to a characters perceptions, thoughts, and feelings) results in a more sympathetic response to the character and Andringa et al testing that theory and finding it doubtful. Gerrig, too, studies effects, examining how focalization elicits “participatory responses,” like the desire to scream “watch out for that bear!” and noting that these participatory responses are often cued when audience expectations differ markedly from character or narrator expectations. Miall and Kuiken are also interested in empirically testing reader perceptions and focus on what they call “aesthetic” rather than character focalization, analyzing how style (the use of defamiliarization, alliteration, etc.) in print texts “re-shapes” reader perceptions and can create emotional responses that may resonate personally and re-determine the “cognitive salience” of what is read. And Herman calls for a more “functionalist” focalization theory, suggesting that we eliminate taxonomies and instead examine how perspective is used in “sense-making.”
My own approach takes a slightly different tack to involving the reader/viewer in the question of “who perceives.” I argue that not everything is rotten in the state of focalization and suggest that adding the category of reader/viewer focalization of unfocalized or indeterminately focalized material to the existing categories (external focalization, internal focalization, hypothetical focalization etc.) can provide productive answers to arguments over questions such as “is there always focalization” and “who is responsible for it if there is?” The analysis of the rhetorical and cognitive function of invitations to audience focalization is a worthwhile enterprise, not only because of what they might do to make audiences feel as though they are a part of another world, even an animated one like Persepolis, but also because they provide a means of analyzing the repercussions of different means of audience engagement, such as the aforementioned “scene of empathy” as well as point-of-view and reaction shots.
This approach could also help serve to redirect the flow of assumptions about audience engagement from film theory to literary criticism, at least with respect to respect for the audience‟s activity in taking part in the construction of perceptual positioning. Borrowing Bordwell‟s building blocks, which have long credited the viewer with being more than a passive receptacle for an already established “point of view,” (1985) I suggest that in cases where material is clearly detached from a diegetic perceiver (whether human, android, or other)for any appreciable amount of time or during significant moments in the text, the resulting question
“who perceives?” is not just an accidental, if interesting, effect, but is instead designed to put pressure on the reader/viewer; because sections of the type I am describing do not provide clear sensory or ideological tags, it would be better to study these portions of film or print text as, to use Gerrig‟s terms, extra invitations to participatory responses. In proposing that sections of the text that appear to be unfocalized are invitations to audience focalization, I do not mean to collapse the boundaries between real world and storyworld to the point where it appears that I am suggesting that audience members can wander about the diegesis sniffing the daisies. Rather, I wish to emphasize that there is more room in existent models for the answer to the question “who perceives,” and that the answer is never meant to be entirely limited to the storyworld.
For an example of the phenomenon I am describing and why it matters, I will turn to Persepolis. Though technically an autobiography, the film does not open by asserting the strong presence of either a perceiving or narrating “I.” Interestingly, the film instead asks that viewers perform an incredible amount of inferential activity, causing them to be partial partners in Persepolis-perceiving from the film‟s outset. While the film is eventually “told” by the adult Marjane as a frame narrator, the film‟s beginning, as well as subsequent in-set episodes, frequently include sections that could not be said to have been focalized by either the adult or child Marjane in terms of audio, vision or feeling (of emotions or other sensations). While some of the non-Marjane sections come from other people in the story level of the diegesis, the film also includes sections that appear to be detached from any perceiving entity, leaving the viewers as perceivers and partial constructors of the meaning.
Persepolis opens with a fantastical title sequence, complete with stylized angels emerging from clouds. After the close of titles, the camera pans over a hill and enters into the realistically-presented world of Orly airport, where no words are uttered for approximately two minutes and thirty seconds. At this point, there is no voice-over narrator or perceiving agent other than the viewer. Viewers must pull cues together from long shots and pans about the type of world they are about to encounter. Is the “I love NY” shirt wearing gentleman in the scene important? Maybe. While Torben Grodal is correct to note that film differs from real life perceptual activity because “film—to a degree—selects perceptual input for us,” it is the “degree” that is important here (1999). Persepolis’s early airport moments leave the perceptual range wide for quite a long time. We see a number of people milling about the airport before focusing in first on a man and then on a woman who turns out to be Satrapi. An establishing shot then shows us that we are looking at the departure board through Satrapi‟s narrowed eyes. Up until this point, there have been no identifiable point-of-view shots and the camera‟s wide angles have allowed a wide range of perceptual activity. Even the audio track here is unobtrusive, briefly providing some traffic noise during the “outside the airport shots,” but allowing viewers to fill in their own expectation of background noise for those scenes in addition to allowing them to determine salient visual details. Persepolis thus begins the story of a woman from Iran who has relocated many times by inviting audience members, whether male, female, old, young, French, Iranian, or what have you, to insert themselves into the storyworld by having them apply their own concepts of what the important aspects of the scene are.
95 The film‟s invitations to viewers to insert themselves into the storyworld via their own frames do not diminish quickly. Even after the film begins to focalize through Satrapi, mostly via point-of-view shots in the beginning, most of the opening avoids focalizing through her or commenting on her with any observable slant even as it begins to turn our attention to her. Though we observe a strikingly similar expression on her face through the first five minutes or so of the film, viewers are required to rifle through their own mental libraries in order to think of what her expression could be in aid of. For example, though we see the airport‟s departure board through Satrapi‟s narrowed eyes and the scene then dissolves to Satrapi gazing blankly at a mirror with the departure numbers still visible, we have no idea what the expression on her face is in service of. Similarly, as we continue to observe her observing herself in the mirror, her mouth is turned down. Is she upset by what she sees in the mirror? We do not know. Satrapi moves through the next few minutes of screen time wearing a similar expression, from the time she is in the restroom to when she stands in line for ticketing. Is she thinking the same thoughts throughout? Viewers are never given an authoritative answer to that question and must apply their own frames of reference.
This approximately 2.5 minute pre-verbal part of Satrapi‟s story works to challenge a number of established orthodoxies, not only about the importance of expanding the question “who perceives?” but also with respect to how much facial expressions, even in animation, can reliably tell us. Scholars such as Carl Plantinga, Noel Carroll, and others have essentially argued that when we see character‟s expressions on film, we can correctly ascertain what it is that those expressions mean. Plantinga argues that while we may guard our expressions in every day life, we can trust that expressions we see on film, especially those in scenes triggered to cause emotional responses, have been selected as relevant and we can therefore trust them. While these critics are correct to note that we do not second guess every screen smile it is not the case, as Persepolis demonstrates in several places, that we can always correctly infer an attitude or belief from a facial expression, even in animation, which has the oft-noted ability to exaggerate posture and expression for emotional effect. In other words, it is too simplistic to say that the meaning of every expression represented in art is pre-digested for reader/viewers, even in cases like animation where an expression cannot accidentally appear on a character‟s face, but must be laboriously drawn iniii. The power of Persepolis’s opening lies in our not being able to determine exactly what these identical expressions in different situations mean and forces us to supply our own readings; to argue that the import and meaning of every expression in film is always already clearly legible risks doing viewers the same disservice with respect to expression reading that Bordwell cautions against with regard to seeing viewers as passive recipients of a point of view. Future studies would do well to examine cases where facial expressions are not clearly legible to examine their rhetorical effect.
While Persepolis’s beginning leaves readers to select their own salient details for the most part, filling in their own scripts for Satrapi‟s look (of trepidation? Detachment?), the rest of the film does provide a more in-depth access to Satrapi‟s felt experience of war and love in Iran and love and loathing in Vienna through a combination of emotion-eliciting reaction shots to death and dismemberment and dream-like sequences that display (sometimes comically) her psychological state. Persepolis’s use of different strategies for viewer engagement with what is, after all, a highly individual story is worth examining in more detail. Viewers move from projecting themselves as themselves, with all their built-in frames of reference, into the world of Persepolis to becoming involved in the world by being encouraged to link themselves with Satrapi through the aforementioned reaction shots and, in some cases, point-of- view shotsiv. At some points, of-view shots meet emotion eliciting shots, such as when we adopt the point-of-view and motion of Satrapi‟s father as he spins her around and observes her ecstatic face.
97 Though we are not prompted to supply our own frames here and are in fact unquestionably seeing through her father‟s eyes and moving with him, we are encouraged to have an affective response to this scene, which is designed to pull us into the storyworld in a more uniform manner. We are all, after all, encouraged to put down our different subject positions and enter the world as Satrapi‟s father and experience a pleasurable response to Marjane‟s joy.
As I have previously noted, Plantinga has observed that, if viewers have been properly “conditioned,” by the narrative, meaning that enough context has been provided, close-ups of the human face have the power to “elicit” rather than merely “communicate” emotion (1999). Persepolis provides several more of these emotion-eliciting by means of facial expression scenes, most notably when the camera focuses on Marjane‟s Munch-like screaming face after she sees her neighbor‟s dismembered hand poking out of the rubble on her bombed street. Scenes like the above point to our ability to become part of another world in another way, through the depiction of scenes designed to make us mirror the expressions presented and thus feel what we believe someone in another world is feeling.
Of course, as Patrick Hogan and others remind us, it is possible that the representation of scenes like the one just described will also prompt us to recall moments in our own lives where we have experienced horror and joy, thus integrating our experiences with the character‟s. However, were this to occur, it would still link us to the represented world with a different from the type of focalization I have described. It integrates the viewer into the scene by a.)prompting the mimicking of expression which can lead to emotion and b.) potentially prompting recall of past related events. The type and amount of immersion in the world presented by reaction shots versus point of view shots and other types of imaginary world entering, such as the audience focalization theory described above, can provide critics with interesting angles to work from when analyzing how viewer immersion changes in type and degree across pieces and what impact the fluctuations have overall. In Persepolis, for example, there is movement from having viewers make the story their own by entering the autobiography as themselves and encouraging them to examine their own ideas about what is important to notice in airports as well as their assumptions about what an unhappy looking woman wearing a headscarf might be thinking to having them become involved, regardless of origins, via responses to others‟ perceptions. It would be worth noting how these different means of audience engagement function across other texts, cross-cultural and otherwise.
References
Andringa, Els and Petra van Horssen, Astrid Jacobs, and Ed Tan. “Point of View and Viewer Empathy On Film.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State University of NY Press, 2001.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Buchan Suzanne. “The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers‟ „Worlds.‟ In
Animated ‘Worlds.‟ Ed. Suzanne Buchan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006 Carroll, Noel. “Film, Emotion and Genre.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion.
Eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1999.
Kuiken, Don and David S. Miall. “Shifting Perspectives: Readers‟ Feelings and Literary Response.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State University of NY Press, 2001.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Gaut, Berys. “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1999.
Gerrig, Richard. “Perspective as Participation.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State University of NY Press, 2001.
Grodal, Torben. “Emotions, Cognitions and Narrative Patterns in Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1999.
Herman, David. “Beyond Voice and Vision: Cognitive Grammar and Focalization Theory.” Point of View, Perspective, Focalization: Modeling Mediacy. Eds. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 119-42.
Hogan, Patrick. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Phelan, James. “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers—and Why It Matters.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State University of NY Press, 2001.
Plantinga, Carl. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1999.
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i Focalization comes from Gerard Genette‟s distinction between who speaks and who sees, or
who perceives. Perception is linked not only to sight, but also smell and other sensations, including outlook
ii In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology Monika Fludernik valuably discusses print narratives
where there appear to be “empty deictic centers” that permit readers to apply their own frames. She does not, however, argue that this constitutes an example of reader focalization and
interestingly maintains Chatman‟s filter/slant distinction elsewhere , though she troubles the story/discourse distinction at other points in her study. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology also avoids analysis of the rhetorical effect and duration of the empty deictic centers.
iii For more on the difference between actor “point of view” and animated pov, see Suzanne
Buchan‟s “The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers‟ „Worlds‟” in Animated Worlds
iv Of course, as Berys Gaut explains, point-of-view shots do equal identification, though they can
facilitate it if there is enough background to link the point of view shot to what she describes as affective, epistemic, and motivational forms of identification.
Elizabeth Nixon is a graduate student at The Ohio State University. She studies emotion,
cognition, and humor. Her essay “It ain't John Shaft": Marvel Gets Multicultural in The Tomb of Dracula” will appear in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010).
