Download (12MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

statement and its visual re-enactment. This sends the viewer's attention back to the start of
the main sequence of narrative events which is represented by images depicting the rain seen
from inside the prostitute's room as she goes about her daily routine. As a consequence,
while viewers are cognitively stimulated by the film's ongoing cinematic techniques, their
impression of the real-time duration of the film is disrupted and a dreamlike sensation is
cued, an effect resembling the strategy adopted by Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1951).(2)
However, this cinematic device is inserted within a broader form of cognitive
engagement elicited from viewers towards the film, this being achieved through the noir
strategies of creating a strong deterministic narration by showing the prostitute's corpse at the
beginning of the film, by using flashbacks that mainly evoke particular environments rather
than being purpose-oriented towards the identification of the murderer, and by using the
detective's voiceover to link the sequences. All these elements in The Grim Reaper reflect the
classic noir narrative structure of retracing the events leading up to a protagonist's undoing,
and they replicate the emotional sense of doomed inevitability that permeates such narratives.
Consequently, the viewers' mental formulation of narrative hypotheses concerning the story's
development and outcome are significantly curtailed. A similar strategy characterizes
Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano from the same year. The first sequence also shows a
corpse, that of the bandit; the narration follows a non-linear structure with long evocative
flashbacks, and the narrative links are similarly assigned to a narrator's voiceover, in this case
Rosi himself. In Rosi's film, after Giuliano's body is featured at the outset, the film is then
structured around Rosi's firm, guiding voiceover; the story's key elements are well known to
Italian audiences, and the use of a realist style and documentary images add a concrete
factuality to the film that leaves viewers little freedom to mentally reconstruct the story on
their own terms.
By contrast, the style used in The Grim Reaper makes greater use of noir conventions
60