Voice-over and self-narrative in film: A multimodal analysis of Antonioni’s When Love Fails (Tentato Suicidio)

Abstract

Stylistic research on film discourse is growing; however, studies rarely take into consideration cinema’s complex message resulting from the combination of the verbal and visual codes. This article proposes a multimodal analysis of Italian auteur Antonioni’s When Love Fails to show how dialogue artfully interacts with elements of the mise-en-scène. The short film, part of a 1953 compilation, is an inquiry into the reality of suicide through the narratives of five women who at one point of their lives attempted suicide. Introducing and orchestrating the stories is a male voice-over and an invisible journalist/interviewer. The study analyses the women’s recollections from a narrative approach and follows how, through their self-presentation strategies, the five survivors project their identity. Not all narratives and narrators are the same; some are interviewer-orchestrated, while two display a better control of their narratives and stronger authorship, which are interpreted here as signs of greater agency. The narrative styles of the more autonomous narrators are various: the creation of vectors and deictic centres through the use of deixis and gaze accompanied by camera movement, and the use of reported speech that construes a complex double plane narrative revolving around the switch from the verbal to the visual plane. In conclusion, the study demonstrates that a stylistic multimodal approach offers a viable tool for a richer understanding of cinema’s semiotic by providing an interface between the levels of verbal and visual communication.