Narrated Films

Avrom Fleishman's investigative foray into the subtleties of filmic narration confronts the oversimplifications to which theoretical as well as conventional understanding can be prone. The result is a genuine pleasure: a book that combines theory and practice in often illuminating ways... He takes well-known and often-discussed films and freshens awareness of them as much by his unexpected pairings as by his narratological acuity... Narrated Films is a model of informed, generous film criticism because of its author's writerly gift for engagement with his reader.

This informative study of the various styles of storytelling ranges from straight voice-over to 'mind-screen' narration, a cinematic version of fiction's interior monologue.

After an accomplished career as a literary critic, Avrom Fleishman may well have written his most engaging book. Narrated Films explores the way certain films narrate the textuality or dramaturgy of their own telling. His illuminating account of such situated storytelling, and of the issues it raises more generally for an aesthetics of modernist narrative, sustains a new and incisive set of distinctions. The book is bound to make its mark at the never livelier crossroad of literary and film theory.