Diegetic stories in a video mediation: a narrative analysis of four videos

This textual study is one element of a doctoral research based on a videotic mediation of four narratives. It functions as a critical reflection on the practical element of the research project and also analyses the theoretical issues arising from the videotic realisation of a diegesis. The text also works to expose and articulate aspects of the structuration of a videotic diegesis, and to identify key research questions, methodologies and research contexts. The practical element of the doctoral project includes the video recording, editing manipulation and representation of four persons delivering a diegesis; the camera registers each narrator and projects her/him in the space of another. The textual study departs from the spectatorial awareness of the event and proceeds to a narrative analysis of diegesis.

There are two interlinked key research questions that have shaped this project. The first is: "How can diegesis be visually manifest as a videotic diegesis?". The second and related question is: "How can diegesis be open up for critical Investigation through an analysis of a narrative?".

Diegesis describes an unrehearsed, oral narrative based on the recounting of a personal experience; hence, the term refers to an actual practice of a language system. The methodology adopted examines diegesis as the object perceived and as an object of perception. It refines the term "diegesis" following its origin, and provides the route for it, the itinerary of a certain trajectory of time and compass of space. The diegetic content is conditional, in the way that the memory of an experience is. For this reason, the analysis commences from the nodes and difficulties of the present diegeses, namely, the moments of dislocation, disarticulation, fragmentation and structuration that function self-reflexively, like a mise-en-abyme of the recounting of a personal narrative.

The methodological principals of the text relate the procedures that form the video- diegetic event to discourse, under the terms of a narrative analysis. The analytic operation begins with the segmentation of the video-diegetic event into its components, and then traces it towards the synthesis of those components into a narrative whole. It identifies the combined elements and the relationships that these develop in the course of organising structural procedures, which increasingly multiply within it. The methodology is crystallised and confirmed by the mode of production it reflects, and it depends on apparatuses analogous to those used in the construction of the project, such as, repetitive regulators of narrative units and cross-referential or self-referential narrative nodes.

The methodology undertaken uses a specific literary and filmic knowledge regime to organise the video-diegetic context, which inscribes the theoretic issues, procedures and the perspectives that have been opened up by the video-diegetic practice. On a syntactical level, it uses specialised vocabularies from the fields of literary and filmic semiotics to present the terms and conditions through which videotic diegesis is analysed. It articulates the unity of a certain style, a certain manner of managing time and space, over which the videotic diegesis produces itself. Hence, it introduces and delimits the video-diegetic context by presenting a series of narrative documents, which is specific to a certain configuration; structures and figures, tactics, criteria and procedures which are realised in the field of videotic diegesis.

On a semantic level, this research project has identified videotic diegesis as an attitude of remembering and reflecting, rather than a tendency of creating a fictional dimension. However, an essential ambiguity remains and makes a certain modality of the project possible. With regard to the present videotic diegeses, this modality refers to the concept of "idleness", which the particular project defines as its necessary condition, without exhausting its potentialities.

While the subject of the project is diegesis, the subject of the presented diegeses Is Idleness, in the everyday sense of the term. Realising these diegeses in their videotic condition, the text considers how a certain medium advances the specific modality. The compelling characteristic of video is that cognition develops from the visuality of the Instance. The concurrent representation gives body to contingency, whilst simultaneously allowing for the intimacy to be ascribed in these narratives, which In addition, are sealed in a claustrophobic format. The representation offers no settings, it uses simple shooting and editing applications; the possibility for the narrator to perform is just as fictional as the possibility for language to ascertain.

The video-diegetic representation verifies, repeats and amplifies the diegetic event, yet, the totality of the practice carries out a labour of two agencies. The first is that of the maker of the diegesis; the second is that of the maker of the video. The first is referred to as 'narrator' and the latter as 'off narrator'. While the narrator delivers a diegesis, the off narrator - using the medium of video to encapsulate, manipulate and represent the event - delivers a videotic diegesis. In the present textual analysis, the course of their occasional operations and functioning processes is reintroduced into the examination of aspects of the video-diegetic representation.

Two aspects are therefore entailed by the video-diegetic representation: an oral presentation and a pictorial one. A constant interaction between them engenders the particular video-diegetic system. This system is situated in relation to its circumstances, I.e., the practice of language and its functions, the practice of video and its effects, and the relations that the Interaction between them fabricates. These elements are organised in a certain structure, which is described under the schema of a spiral. The spiral structure gives evidence of similarity, difference, equivalence, repetition, interruption and retardation as its local spatial/temporal tactics.

The exercised tactics inform a significant tension behind the act of narrating, which is the eagerness of the narrator to exchange her/his identity with a story. One of the characteristics of such an activity is the exposition of "deficits" among the narrative units. Deficits are non-transparent narrative units responsible for keeping the video- diegetic structure open. However, the decision to organise the videotic diegeses under an elliptical, yet open, spiral structure is encouraged by some attributes of the diegesis itself, i.e., the subjective position of the narrator in relation to the content of her/his narrative and the subjective speech s/he uses to actualise a diegesis. The factor of subjectivity led the study to the field of reflexivity.

An open system sustains the possibility for pursuing a variety of different courses of development of the videotic diegesis. The present one is driven by the conditions of remembrance. Remembrance functions in a double level; firstly, in the very diegeses, insofar as each narrator attempts an articulation of a personal story of a 'time-past'; secondly, the relevant topological videotic elaboration is also inspired from the tactics of remembrance. The concomitant shift is more interesting in its results than its causes.

Access to this this thesis is restricted. Please contact UAL Research Online for more information.