Narration and Description: The Nature and Function of the Shot and the Syntagm in Audiovisual Discourse

This article aims to rewrite the narration-description dichotomy proceeding from literature in terms of narration, visual description, psychological description, qualification & designation in order for it to be correctly applied to audiovisual discourse. To this end, a distinction is made between three strata: the shot, the syntagm & the discourse. In each of them we differentiate between the nature of the segment, determined by the type of relationship set up amongst the elements that form it, & the regime or function that it fulfils in the fragment that encompasses it. This distinction enables us to understand how descriptive audiovisual discourses can be formed of narrative syntagms or narrative audiovisual discourses from descriptive segments, as well as allowing us to distinguish between singular & habitual actions or between nodes & satellites in narrative discourses. This requires the qualification that description in audiovisual discourse, understood as description of visible qualities, can occur simultaneously to the narration & that audiovisual description does not require, as it does in literature, that the time of the narrative should stop. References. Adapted from the source document