Implicit Cinematic Narrator Revisited

Abstract The status of implicit narrators in fiction film has been the subject of ongoing debate (Curran 2016, 2019; Livingston 2021). Advocates of the concept posit an underlying narrative agent—commonly referred to as the cinematic narrator (Chatman 1990)—which presents the audio-visual content of a film from outside the storyworld yet within the bounds of fictional discourse. This figure has been described under various terms, including the ‘Image-maker’ (Kozloff 1988), ‘Grand Imagier’ (Metz 1974), and ‘Filmic narrator’ (Gunning 1994). This article questions the existence of such a narrative agent, with particular attention to George Wilson's (2011) influential account and its more recent developments by García-Carpintero (2022) and Terrone (2022). While our primary focus is on film, we will occasionally draw on the literary debate, as arguments for implicit film narrators often parallel those in literary theory.