Words on Screen

By Michel Chion

Michel Chion is well known in contemporary film studies for his innovative investigations into aspects of cinema that scholars have traditionally overlooked. Following his work on sound in film in Audio-Vision and Film, a Sound Art, Words on Screen is Chion’s survey of everything the seventh art gives us to read on screen. He analyzes titles, credits, and intertitles, but also less obvious forms of writing that appear on screen, from the tear-stained letter in a character’s hand to reversed writing seen in mirrors. Through this examination, Chion delves into the multitude of roles that words on screen play: how they can generate narrative, be torn up or consumed but still remain in the viewer’s consciousness, take on symbolic dimensions, and bear every possible relation to cinematic space.

With his characteristic originality, Chion performs a poetic inventory of the possibilities of written text in the film image. Taking examples from hundreds of films spanning years and genres, from the silents to the present, he probes the ways that words on screen are used and their implications for film analysis and theory. In the process, he opens up and unearths the specific poetry of visual text in film. Exhaustively researched and illustrated with hundreds of examples, Words on Screen is a stunning demonstration of a creative scholar’s ability to achieve a radically new understanding of cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9780231543453

Book preview

Words on Screen

Film and Culture

A Series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton

For the list of titles in this series, see pages 247–48.

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English translation © 2017 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chion, Michel, 1947- author. | Gorbman, Claudia editor translator.

Title: Words on screen / Michel Chion ; edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman.

Other titles: Écrit au cinéma. English

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014672 | ISBN 978-0-231-17498-5 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-231-17499-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-231-54345-3 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Writing in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Titling. | Motion pictures—Aesthetics.

Classification: LCC PN1995.3 .C455 2017 | DDC 791.4302/4–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014672

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

Part I: An Infinite Inventory

1. The Name on Screen

2. Nondiegetic Writing

3. Diegetic Writing as Athorybos

Part II: Writing, Reading

4. Fingers, Tablets, and Machines Writing

5. From Books Undone, Films

6. Half-Reading

7. Hearing One Language and Reading Another

Part III: Writing in Film Space

8. Writing in the Land of Three Dimensions

9. Anagrams and Clinamen

10. Excription

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Illustrations

The frame stills provided in the center section of this book may not be entirely faithful to their original appearance in films. Often the image’s original aspect ratio has had to be changed; contrast may vary, and of course, the color has been drained from the original color films. In many instances I have reframed an image to zero in on an area that contains writing and exaggerated contrast and brightness to make words more readable.

Throughout the text bold parenthetical reference numbers guide readers to the relevant images.

1. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

2. Agora (Alejandro Amenábar, 2009)

3. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

4. The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak, 2011)

5. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

6. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

7. Le amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)

8. The Pilgrim (Charles Chaplin, 1923)

9. La signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, 1934)

10. Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

11. L’humanité (Bruno Dumont, 1999)

12. Améli e (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2003)

13. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933)

14. Happy New Year (La Bonne Année, Claude Lelouch, 1973)

15. The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004)

16. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

17. Once upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

18. Plein soleil (Purple Noon, René Clément, 1960)

19. Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)

20. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

21. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

22. The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1994)

23. The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1994)

24. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)

25. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

26. Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)

27. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

28. The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Madame de . . . , Max Ophüls, 1953)

29. Fellini’s Casanova (Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini, 1976)

30. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)

31. Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)

32. Boys’ School (Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, Christian-Jaque, 1938)

33. Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

34. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

35. Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961)

36. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki, Mikio Naruse, 1960)

37. The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)

38. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

39. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

40. Breathless (À bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)

41. King Solomon’s Mines (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950)

42. The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

43. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

44. Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

45. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

46. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)

47. Mademoiselle s’amuse (Jean Boyer, 1948)

48. The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958)

49. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

50. Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

51. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

52. Mon oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)

53. West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1960)

54. In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003)

55. Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)

56. The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

57. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)

58. The Celebration (Festen, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)

59. Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

60. A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, Robert Bresson, 1956)

61. Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel, Ingmar Bergman, 1961)

62. Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

63. Love in the City (L’amore in città, Carlo Lizzani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dino Risi, Federico Fellini, Cesare Zavattini, Umberto Maselli, Alberto Lattuada, 1953)

64. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920)

65. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, Agnès Varda, 1962)

66. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

67. Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

68. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Teny zabutykh predkiv, Sergei Parajanov, 1965)

69. The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925)

70. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, Fritz Lang, 1922)

71. October (S. M. Eisenstein, 1928)

72. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

73. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922)

74. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

75. Towards the Light (Mod lyset, Holger-Madsen, 1919)

76. Just a Gigolo (short) (Dave Fleischer, 1932)

77. Street Angel (Malu tianshi, Yuan Muzhi, 1937)

78. The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)

79. A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)

80. Fruit of Paradise (Ovoce stromu rajskych jime, Vera Chytilovà, 1970)

81. The Devil’s Eye (Djävulens öga, Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

82. The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

83. Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, Wim Wenders, 1976)

84. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)

85. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)

86. Black Heaven (L’Autre Monde, Gilles Marchand, 2010)

87. The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989)

88. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

89. Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922)

90. The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)

91. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

92–93. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)

94. Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

95. Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

96. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

97–98. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)

99. Divine Intervention (Yadon ilaheyya, Elia Suleiman, 2002)

100. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

101. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

102. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)

103. Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971)

104. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)

105. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

106. Contempt (Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

107. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

108. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

109. The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957)

110. The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

111. Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississippi, François Truffaut, 1969)

112. Road Trip (Todd Phillips, 2000)

113. Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)

114. La Fin du monde (Abel Gance, 1931)

115. Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1999)

116. Love and the Frenchwoman (La Française et l’Amour, Henri Decoin, Jean Delannoy, Michel Boisrond, René Clair, Henri Verneuil, Christian-Jaque, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, 1960)

117. M (M., eine Stadt such einen Mörder, Fritz Lang, 1931)

118. The Informer (John Ford, 1935)

119. Killer’s Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

120. Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, Béla Tarr, 2000)

121. They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

122. The Faithful Heart (Cœur fidèle, Jean Epstein, 1923)

123. Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

124. Fellini Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969)

125. City of Women (La città delle donne, Federico Fellini, 1980)

126. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

127. Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

128. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

129. Titanic (James Cameron, 1995)

130. Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, S. M. Eisenstein, 1925)

131. Sinners’ Holiday (John G. Adolfi, 1930)

132. The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

133. Daisies (Sedmikràsky, Vera Chytilovà, 1966)

134. Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

135. A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)

136. Bed & Board (Domicile conjugal, François Truffaut, 1970)

137. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

138. Au bonheur des dames [The ladies’ paradise] (Julien Duvivier, 1930)

139. The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)

140. The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

141. Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)

142. The 13th Warrior (John McTiernan, 1999)

143. Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

144. Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)

145. A Tale of Winter (Conte d’hiver, Eric Rohmer, 1992)

146. The Fly (Kurt Neumann Jr., 1958)

147. Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)

148. Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985)

149. The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos, Juan José Campanella, 2009)

150. Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982)

151. Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006)

152. Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, 1999)

153. Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992)

154. Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

155. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

156. Frequency (Gregory Hoblit, 1999)

157. The World (Shijie, Jia Zhangke, 2004)

158. The Minister (L’Exercice de l’État, Pierre Schoeller, 2011)

159. The Mummy (Stephen Sommers, 1999)

160. Noce blanche (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1989)

161. Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

162. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954)

163. Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991)

164. Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

165–168. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang, 1933)

169–170. Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne, Robert Bresson, 1951)

171. A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, Robert Bresson, 1956)

172–173. Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

174. On the Avenue (Roy Del Ruth, 1937)

175. The Passion of Anna (En passion, Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

176. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

177. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

178. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

179. Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

180–181. Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976)

182. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

183–184. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)

185. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

186. Kaagaz Ke Phool [Paper flowers] (Guru Dutt, 1959)

187. Rythmetic (short) (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1956)

188. Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

189. Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006)

190–191. The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932)

192. The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990)

193. All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)

194. Broken Lullaby (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

195. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

196–197. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

198–199. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

200. Once upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)

201. Une femme mariée (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

202. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)

203–204. Frantic (Roman Polanski, 1986)

205–206. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

207–208. The Dark Corner (Henry Hathaway, 1946)

209. Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (Robert Parrish, 1969)

210–212. Casque d’or (Jacques Becker, 1952)

213. The Front Page (Billy Wilder, 1974)

214. The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004)

215. Austin Powers in Goldmember (Jay Roach, 2002)

216. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

217. Shall We Dance (Mark Sandrich, 1937)

218. You and Me (Fritz Lang, 1938)

219. Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli, 1949)

220. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

221. People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930)

222. Day of Wrath (Vredens dag, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943)

223. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

224. With a Friend like Harry . . . (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien, Dominik Moll, 2000)

225. The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2001)

226. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

227. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

228. Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

229. Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)

230. Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006)

231. Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)

232. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

233. Anémic cinéma (short) (Marcel Duchamp, 1926)

234. The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, Wim Wenders, 1972)

235. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

236. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

237. Paradis pour tous (Alain Jessua, 1982)

238. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

239. Traffic (Trafic, Jacques Tati, 1971)

240. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

241. Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)

242. The Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, Fritz Lang, 1929)

243. La antena (Esteban Sapir, 2007)

244. Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968)

245. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

246. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

247. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (serial) (Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1940)

248. The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)

249–250. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

251. Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938)

252. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

253. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

254–256. The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Max Ophüls, 1953)

Preface

In Stanley and Iris (Martin Ritt, 1989) the illiterate cook (Robert De Niro) whom Iris (Jane Fonda) has just taught to read is delighted that he can decode everything he sees, from street names to the Bible. . . . This book similarly deals with everything written and printed in films. While working on it, I tried to become a child again, hungry to read even the labels on water bottles. Nothing is too humble or negligible here.

I have been asked, Words on screen, what’s that about? and each time I’ve answered: everything the movie screen has offered us to read since the seventh art was born. This includes titles, of course, and intertitles and other subtitles; but it also means the letters written and read by characters, telegrams, text messages, words scrawled on windows or printed on visiting cards and hotel signs, banners, posters, traffic and street signs; words on computer screens, and all that is traced in air, on snow and in sand, on metal or wood, not to mention paper, as well as across the sky and on human skin.

Does this make for a book topic? I certainly believe it does. I have begun with the simplest approach: an inventory. A generous research grant in 2011 and 2012 from the Internationales Kolleg für Kultur-technikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) in Weimar, where I stayed for several months, gave me the luxury of time to watch or rewatch about nine hundred films, and to capture thousands of images from them, only a modest number of which appear in this book. For each example shown or discussed here, twenty others could have been supplied.

Once upon a time there was writing, as told by movies: its birth, the way it stands out against the continuum of the world, from which it is separate (what I call excription).

Once upon a time there was cinema, which tells itself via the role it gives to the written, by including writing without managing to integrate it, seeking to represent itself as an autonomous art form, presenting itself as writing by consuming the written.

These two symmetrical ideas sometimes meet and fuse, and the encounter yields a form of poetry.

This work, then, is a poetic sketch of a vast topic about which you could imagine a much more significant book made up of a vast fresco of five or six thousand frame images.

I ask the reader not to lose patience with the enumerative aspect of the first three chapters. My aim is to show rather than demonstrate and, if possible, to embrace the entire range of cinema (except for gaps in non-Western cinemas) in exploring this theme.

The subject did not come to me by accident. My first book on film, The Voice in Cinema (La Voix au cinéma, 1982), devoted considerable attention to two films that already accord great importance to written text: Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse and Welles’s Citizen Kane. Logically, I arrived at the idea for this book when the IKKM (which I can never thank enough for having entrusted this research to me) offered to host me for a semester.

I certainly do not claim to be the first to take on the subject of words on screen. The writings of Béla Balázs, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Tom Conley, Joachim Paech, Wolfgang Beilenhoff, Christian Metz, Michel Marie, and others taught me a great deal. I simply wished to try taking a more comprehensive approach.

My warmest thanks go to the IKKM, especially to its directors, Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert, but also to its members Michael Cuntz, Anne Ortner, Wolfgang Beilenhoff, Wolfram Nitsch, André Wendler, and Falk Ritter, as well as the team at 47 Cranachstrasse—Kristina Hellmann, Ulrike Engelbert, Anke Trojan, Oliver Tege, and other fellows including Thomas Levin, Jörg Dünne, Weihong Bao, and Mary Ann Doane. Those days spent in Weimar, a city so marked by history and culture, linger as warm and invigorating memories.

I thank Michel Marie, who welcomed this book into his excellent series in France, for his reading, encouragement, and suggestions. And for our discussions and the information they supplied I am indebted to Silvia Angrisani, Jérôme Bloch, Jacques and Anne-Marie Chion, Kos-tia Milhakiev, Geoffroy Montel, and Jacques Wajnapel, who opened up so many paths to me; Frank Aidan, for his encouragement, and of course Anne-Marie Marsaguet-Chion, who supported me through all its stages and whose piano playing accompanied numerous hours of writing.

Finally, I am most grateful to Jennifer Crewe and Columbia University Press for having selected this book for publication in English following other works of mine; and of course my sincere thanks go to Claudia Gorbman, whose precise translation work and consistently pertinent and vigilant queries helped make it even more worthy of presentation to a larger public.

Introduction

Cinema might be defined in essence as an art of figuratively, dramatically, and expressively combining sounds and images in motion. But it is much more complicated because language, too, plays a big part—even if cinema only adopted language in the beginning (in the silent era) as a kind of foreign body and seemed to marginalize it by relegating it to intertitles (for that matter, silent films could get along passably without it).

This is why, in Audio-vision (1990), I spoke of "audio-logo-vision." Indeed, that which divides writing and speech has nothing to do with what differentiates sound from image.

The difference between sound and image in cinema does not prevent the two from having certain dimensions in common (particularly the dimensions of rhythm and time but others too). But the writing of words and the sound of speech, which seem to be similar, are in fact quite different; they have a much more chaotic relationship, owing to conventions that make little sense and to complex historical factors where logic plays only a minor role.

The presence of language redivides what we perceive in a film.

Writing¹ has always existed in cinema; in silent film it was much more than a crutch or merely the way to make up for the absence of sound. Writing took on symbolic and formal dimensions very early on.

From the start the presence of writing in the film image seems to have had several justifications and several forms. It had a utilitarian function in silent film, where it supposedly made up for deficiencies, allowing viewers to follow at least some of what characters were saying to one another (a function transposed, in the sound film, to the technique of subtitling, allowing for the sound of the original voice and its translation into the audience’s language). But soon also, written text contributed to the structuring of the film into parts and introduced a dialogue between what was verbalized and what was shown.

In the sound film, writing retains some of the utilitarian aspects that it had in the silents, when, with just a few inserted or overlaid words (see below), it can tell us who is who, where we are, what day of the week or what year it is, what is the historical context, and so forth; in this way it spares the film from laborious exposition and at the same time opens new possibilities for giving false leads.

The second concrete justification for written words in films is simply that films show living characters in the physical world, where the written word has long held significant and indeed increasing importance, both private and public: thus diegetic writing naturally has a place.

But these functions became integral parts of cinema fairly quickly and joined with others; written text, whether diegetic or nondiegetic, took on symbolic, cinematic dimensions.

Is this distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic still useful and pertinent? To answer this question—and although, as we know, gags when described rarely remain funny—let me begin by discussing a gag in a film.

In Austin Powers in Goldmember (Jay Roach, 2002) a discussion occurs between the super secret agent Austin Powers (Mike Myers) and Mr. Roboto, who is Japanese, each character speaking his own language. The Japanese is subtitled in English. We read incongruous or offensive phrases in the subtitles—these weird statements being created by various white objects that happen to be in the set and that mask parts of the subtitle. Your ass is happy, we read: between ass and is, also between is and happy there are blocs of white—all Austin has to do is move or mask them so that we can read the complete sentence: Your assignment is an unhappy one.² Mr. Roboto follows with, Why don’t I just speak in English? and Austin answers, That way, I wouldn’t misread the subtitles!

The gag lies in the fact that the viewer is supposed to have located what she or he saw in two different, superimposed worlds: the diegetic world and the other one, the world not belonging to what the characters could be perceiving. The viewer can thus enjoy seeing the characters straddling this borderline and being conscious of everything on the screen. As I have noted elsewhere,³ more and more films are basing entire screenplays on crossing this boundary and not merely making the occasional gag out of it.⁴ But this border-crossing serves only to further reinforce the distinction—just as in French poetry the frequent use of enjambment (running one line into another) served to reaffirm the integrity of the twelve-syllable alexandrine verse and to make it last a century longer.

Not only do I consider the classical distinction to be pertinent (reinforced, rather than abolished, by the muddying of this boundary, as we will see in some examples), but I will go one step further and say that this is not some abstract distinction but rather a distinction between two realities and no less, neither one dominated by the other: diegetic reality and cinematic reality.

I call diegetic reality in a fiction film what happens to the characters, what they can know and perceive (to the extent that we can know this). Cinematic reality is what occurs on the screen and in the loudspeaker—framing, cuts, eyeline matches, and so forth. Cinematic reality is not simply an illustration or an expressive mise-en-scène of diegetic reality; even less is it an external translation of the interior psychological state of the characters.

As an example, consider changes of scale. When a character jots down some important information on a scrap of paper, the form of this information (e.g., a scribbled phone number) can in diegetic reality be the size of a matchbook; but the close-up can give it a much bigger status in cinematic reality (it is literally big on the screen). The close-up shows how writing transcends differences of scale.⁵

Now permit me to name a third reality, profilmic reality. This reality is what supposedly happens in the various stages of the making of the film—of course on the set but also what precedes and what follows. Our musings about the profilmic reality (I call this activity profilmic reverie) are part of the film-watching experience. Reading a handwritten text attributed to a character, we might reasonably ask who really wrote it down (in many cases it’s the film’s director). This question about profilmic reality is not a parasitic intrusion; it’s part of the thoughts that may well occur to us as we watch.

In light of these distinctions, writing has five principal ways of appearing in a film:

1. I will call porch-writing the nondiegetic writing that frames the film at the beginning and end. This means the titles that might unroll against a totally neutral background or an abstract or textural background (e.g., fabric or a wall surface) that is independent of the development of the story or even made in relief in an abstract three-dimensional space (sky, water, outer space). It includes The End when it appears against a nondiegetic background. See, for example, stills 33 to 36 (company logos), 40, 42, 43 (movie titles), and 80 (The End).⁶

2. I will refer to overlays or overlaid writing when written text is nondiegetic and in the foreground, standing before the diegetic space. This applies to beginning or end titles when they are superimposed over diegetic setting and action (14, 57, 79), as well as certain narrative details or information (day of the week, time, place, name of a character, title of a section) (65, 67), and also subtitles translating foreign languages or speech that is inaudible to the viewer.

As nondiegetic text that displays itself in front of diegetic images, the overlay presents new problems when the image is three-dimensional. (See chapter 8 on this topic.)

Note that on DVDs it is increasingly common to place subtitles beneath the image on a black background, making them easier to read and less intrusive on the image.

3. Written text is included when it is part of the setting, in the diegetic space, but is not meant as the central element or the subject of the shot. The inclusion is by definition diegetic and always capable of being the subject of an insert, which by making the written text an element of montage can transform its meaning.

It is possible to transform an insert into an inclusion (and vice versa) via camera movement or focus change—in other words not necessarily through editing but in a continuous shot (176).

The role of included written material in films is much more significant than one might think. The viewer’s eye, even when occupied by busy action on the screen, lingers on diegetic written elements—shop windows, signs, traffic indications, posters, advertisements, and so on, whether they are in the foreground or not. They situate the era and the location, and they create a sense of daily life. Often, these diegetic written elements act as athorybal messages (see chapter 3).

Contemporary life has increased tenfold the number of inclusions in our urban setting. You can presumably make a film with very few inclusions, but to do so in any modern location, you really have to work to select and eliminate written text during production (and of course in the digital age you can do some of this selection in postproduction, erasing from the image after the fact).

At the other end, Godard has an