Professor of film and media studies, Branigan’s areas of specialty include classical and contemporary film theory, film analysis, and film narratology. Branigan defines narrative as the intersection of subject and process, by using formal shot analysis for close readings attuned to ideological issues. Believing that narrative is “a way of organizing spatial and temporal events into a cause-event chain of events with a beginning, a middle, and end that embodies a judgement about the nature of events…“
Edward Branigan
(1945 - 2019)
Branigan theorizes that the spectator comprehends a media text, in this case a film narrative by drawing on concepts from cognitive science.To apply his theory to film narrative, he looks at film through agency and the use of that agency in film shots. At shot level, the film agents are related to several degrees of narration and Branigan
argues that there are fiive different types of agents at work in the process of narration: historical authors, implied authors, narrators, characters and focalizers.
The most important contribution Branigan makes to the theory of narration resides in the category of the focalizers. He defines focalization as reflection that involves a character neither speaking (narrating, reporting, communicating) nor acting (focusing, focused by), but rather actually experiencing something through seeing or hearing it. Focalization also extends to more complex experiencing of objects: thinking, remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing, desiring, understanding, feeling guilt.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Narration, should be understood as “the overall regulation and distribution of knowledge which determines how and when a spectator acquires knowledge of narrative events. (Branigan)”
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Narrative analysis considers how a range of elements, including mise-en-scene, editing, camera work, sound and events, create meaning for the audience.
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Narrative will always embody a judgement based in its ideology.
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When an audience “reads” a film, it deploys its prior and emotional knowledge to create meaning.
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Cognitivist film theory involves the construction” of perceptual or cognitive conclusions based on nonconscious inferences, which are in turn constituted by “evidences” offered by perceptual data, internalized rules and schemata, and additional prior knowledge.
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Branigan’s theory of agents can be applied to four types of film shots. (1) the objective shot motivated by an agent outside the world of the film, (2) the externally focalized shot which focalizes a character’s awareness of diegetic events (ex. an over the shoulder shot), (3) the internally focalized shot (representing a character’s visual experience of diegetic events), and (4) the internally focalized shot (depth) that represents a character’s internal events, such as dreams.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Narrative story – all events referenced both explicitly in a narrative and inferred.
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Narrative plot – the events directly incorporated into the action of the text and the order in which they are presented.
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Narrative identity -- cognitive psychology theory that postulates that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self, which provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life.
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Narrative schema -- a representation of a plan or theory in the form of an outline or model. Narrative schema contain events and participants, but also a temporal ordering.
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Narrative agents -- historical authors, implied authors, narrators, characters and focalizers.
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Focalizer – refers to character perspective through which a narrative is presented.