How, then, might we actually use the schemata of "narrator" or "author" in understanding particular film narratives? Or, rather, how might particular films themselves cue those schemata, use those assumptions, foreground narrative agency, for their perceivers? These questions deserve fuller analysis and study than I can give here, but I can offer a few brief examples that suggest some directions that such analysis might take. These examples are mostly within the tradition of the classical Hollywood narrative: all are American films, all have narratives motivated by the goals and desires of individual characters, all involve change through conflicting goals and desires, almost all end with a high degree of resolution. All of these films also foreground, throwing into relief, issues of agency—how they are being narrated and/or how they have been created.

I do not want to claim that these films are in any way "typical" in their evocation of narrators and/or implied filmmakers. While the vast majority of films (at least those within the classical tradition) may evoke scant attention to "narrators" or "authors," a significant minority may still foreground elements of style (lighting, camerawork, etc.) without raising issues of agency in an overt way. (Many films noirs function in such a way.) Even fewer films, such as the ones here, will point back to sources of "telling" or "showing" in a noticeable way, and even then those cues evoking narrative agents are of disparate types.

Furthermore, I doubt that we can offer a single synchronic model of such evocation of agency beyond those offered by the theorists discussed above. However, these examples do suggest a sort of historical development of the evocation of "narrators" and "filmmakers" within the movie. For nearly a century, film historians, critics and even filmmakers have operated under a simple—and simplistic—dichotomy: the heirs of Georges Melies versus the heirs of the Lumiere brothers; those who manipulated the film medium and those who used it to record the world; or, in Bazin’s famous words, "those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality" (24). A different (if not equally simplistic) distinction might be between those filmmakers who still relied on literary or dramatic models for narration and those who tried to develop the medium in a different direction. In general, one might expect a shift in emphasis from the former to the latter over time. Still, my sample is too small to be conclusive, and even if such a trend can be demonstrated, I would have to doubt its teleological inevitability. Yet I believe that the distinction may be of some use in noting how films evoke different cues and clues to their own agency.

Briefly, the examples below all evoke audience awareness or inference of their own "narrators" and/or "filmmakers" for different ends. The first case is one of "overdetermined" narration, with a narrator whose comments are redundant or even excessive in relation to the narrative portrayed by the images. The second case is of a film that in most respects skillfully uses common narrative and stylistic devices of the classical Hollywood cinema but sets the entire narrative in a highly self-referential context that signifies the film’s own making. The third example offers contradictory "narrations" that create a logical paradox in terms of the film’s explicit "meanings" while also evoking a sense of a narrating consciousness and a very real "implied author" behind it all. Finally, I conclude with a few words about a contemporary film whose multiple, overdetermined modes of narration pose a different set of issues of comprehension for viewers than the first example.