That reality, the match of film and world, is a matter of representation, and representation in turn is a matter of discourse, of the organization of the images, the definition of the “views,” their construction. It is the discursive operations that decide the work of a film and ultimately determine the scope of the analogical incidence of images; in this sense at least, film is a series of languages, a history of codes. 384

To link scenes as story is not yet to contain that excess in the achievement of a homogeneously continuous space, the spectator cut off in as subject precisely to a process of vision, a positioning and position of movement. 385

Narrative contains the mobility that could threaten the clarity of vision in a constant renewal of perspective; space becomes place — narrative as the taking place of film — in a movement which is no more than the fulfillment of the Renaissance impetus… What is crucial is the conversion of seen into scene, the holding of signifier on signified: the frame, composed, centered, narrated, is the point of that conversion. 392

The center [of film] is the movement, not movements but the logic of a consequent and temporally coherent action. The vision of the image is its narrative clarity and that clarity hangs on the negation of space for place, the constant realization of center in function of narrative purpose, narrative movement… 394

The structure of the photographic image — with its vision, its scene, its distance, its normality — is to film somewhat as language is to the novel: the grounds of its representation, which representations can include the creation of an acknowledged movement of point of view. 400

What moves in film, finally, is the spectator, immobile in front of the screen. Film is the regulation of that movement, the individual as subject held in a shifting and placing of desire, energy, contradiction, in a perpetual retotalization of the imaginary (the set scene of image and subject). This is the investment of film in narrativization; and crucially for a coherent space, the unity of place for vision. 404

It is the coherence of fiction that falls: the fiction film disrespects space in order to construct a unity that will bind spectator and film in its fiction; where a Godard breaks space, fragments and sets up oppositions in the interests of analysis (”analysis with image and sound”), Straub and Hiller film a unity, sound and image, in and off, that will never “make a scene”; in both cases, the address is complex, in process, no longer the single and central vision but a certain freedom of contradictions. 406