ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the Morphology of Film Narrative

Abstract

When Vladimir Propp died in 1970, his name had become a reference point in the theory of narrative. The Morphology of the Folktale, published in Russian in 1928, appeared in English thirty years later and was soon brought out in other languages. Anthropologists and folklorists were quick to praise, criticize, test, and revise his claims.' A. J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Bremond, and Roland Barthes made the Morphology one point of departure for structuralist narratology, and homage is still paid in the poststructuralist era.2 Soon after the publication of the 1968 revised English edition of the Morphology, Peter Wollen suggested that Propp might be a fruitful source for cinema semiotics, and over the last decade, film and television studies have developed a tradition of morphological analysis.3 As recently as 1985, a writer in The Cinema Book allotted several large-format pages to analysis.4 For many critics, Propp has become the Aristotle of film narratology; yet his influence has come at the cost of serious misunderstandings. The English editions of the Morphology pose problems of injudicious editing and faulty translation. More problematically, film scholars have taken Propp out of context and recast him almost out of recognition. There are good reasons to regard the Proppian approach to film narrative as a dead end. The argument for the morphological approach, although usually tacit, seems to run this way5: