The original 1937 version of A Star Is Born is another film that displays contradictory approaches to its narration. The fabula/story, source of two remakes with Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, is about a young woman who aspires to stardom, achieves fame and success, but pays for that success with her broken heart through marriage to another star whose career is on a fast downward track. In most respects, its narration is a fine example of the classical Hollywood style, demonstrating how time can be advanced and delayed; how information can be given, restricted or withheld; and how humor and pathos can be generated through various means without recourse to overt extradiegetic narratorial commentary.

Shot framings, editing techniques, and setting and lighting are all used to evoke sympathy for the characters, advance the story and provide cues to the interpretation of the characters and the plot. One way that the film does these things is by sharply restricting information so that our knowledge and sympathies are liable to be with the character who is the focus of most of that information. Thus, for about the first half of the film, we usually know only what is known to the main character Esther Blodgett, who will eventually become the film star Vicki Lester (Janet Gaynor). There are certain exceptions. For example, we see Esther’s boardinghouse landlord (Edgar Kennedy) tearing up her bill without her knowledge, thus reinforcing sympathy with her seemingly quixotic quest for fame. Toward the end of this half, we also see a few scenes where movie star Norman Maine (Fredric March) confers with his producer Oliver Niles (Adolph Menjou) about his drinking problem, thus establishing important information about Norman’s character. The second half of the film relaxes the restriction of information so that we know more about Norman’s character, thus establishing greater sympathy for him despite his problems and behavior.

Another major element of the film’s narration is through parallelism, where setting, behavior and dialogue are used to establish similarities between characters and situations. Thus, as a plot arc, the Rise of Vicki Lester in the first half is inversely parallel to the Decline of Norman Maine in the second. Dialogue establishes a parallel between Esther and her grandmother, a pioneer settler in North Dakota, who urges her granddaughter to be another "pioneer" by going to Hollywood. Most powerfully, parallelism can establish contrasts for emotional effect. Norman and Vicki’s wedding takes place in a courthouse, before a judge, with the couple holding hands. Much later, when Norman has been arrested for drunkenness, Vicki holds his hand and pleads with the judge to release Norman into her custody. When the judge asks if she knows what a responsibility she is taking, she replies, "I do."

These instances of the affective power of film narration, and others, emerge from within the diegesis itself and give little sense of overt narrational presentation or commentary. There are, however, other elements that are more borderline, at least hinting at some agency of presentation beyond that fictional world. One borderline case that is typical of many other films is in the use of nondiegetic music. Max Steiner’s score may strike modern ears as obsessive and overdetermined, but it is fairly typical of music in many classical and even contemporary films. Steiner resorts to motifs that signal characters and places. Esther’s arrival in Hollywood is marked by bars of "California, Here I Come!" Her grandmother is associated with "Auld Lang Syne." Most important is Steiner’s "Star Is Born" theme of ten notes that, like "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" in Stagecoach, serves a variety of functions. It provides the film with a unifying musical structure. It can be simple background accompaniment to a scene. It helps to bridge transitions of space and time. Played by muted brasses, it seems to offer a mocking commentary on certain scenes or newspaper headlines. Most importantly, welling up in volume and full orchestration, it adds pathos and emotional resonance to some scenes, notably the one just before Norman commits suicide and the concluding scene of Vicki’s triumphant return to stardom as "Mrs. Norman Maine."

Steiner’s nondiegetic theme could be taken as a sign of overt film "narration," but it is still unlikely to signal the presence of a specific extradiegetic agent. The theme certainly does have a narratorial function, but its relative heavy-handedness is more a matter of Steiner’s compositional style than of the use of music as such (which functions within well-established conventions of film narrative). As with Stagecoach, it would be difficult to follow Levinson and assign this theme or other elements of the score an overall "film narrator" or "implied filmmaker." The exception, as we will see, is when it serves to reinforce a satiric tone.

A better case for the presence of a narrator as agent can be made for the one nondiegetic intertitle that occurs within the body of the narrative itself. Just after Esther leaves cold, dark North Dakota on the train, a title announces that she and we are in "HOLLYWOOD! The beckoning El Dorado . . . " The boldness of the title, superimposed on the sun-drenched hills of southern California, creates a sharp contrast with the opening scenes. The purple prose of the title also serves to set up a satiric edge, as we see people lounging by a hotel pool only to become aware that they are part of a scene being filmed. The implication is that, as Oscar Levant put it, when you strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you find the real tinsel underneath. That implication, though, seems to be at odds with the general tenor of the story, which is in the vein of the genre of the "woman’s picture" or "tearjerker," involving suffering, loss, and redemption by a female lead character. In contrast to such pathos, satire usually requires a distance from its subject that is at odds with the emotional identification required for the tearjerker. A Star Is Born usually finds its satiric subjects within the mise-en-scene but will create emotional distance through the occasional mocking tone of a musical phrase or, in this case, this one intertitle.

However, as a film made in Hollywood about Hollywood, A Star Is Born also demonstrates a relatively high degree of "self-consciousness," as defined by David Bordwell: when the narration displays "a recognition that it is addressing an audience" (NITFF 58). That "recognition" can take different forms, as it does in this film. "Backstage" scenes of film production demonstrate an awareness of an audience that understands "Hollywood" and the studios as institutions, that is desirous for "backstage" information, but that is also very aware of certain ploys and conventions of film making and screen publicity [11]. The most overt cueing of such audience awareness, however, occurs at the very beginning and again at the very end of the film in shots of the film’s own screenplay. After the credit sequence, we see the cover of the final shooting script for A Star Is Born being stamped "Approved." A hand turns to the first page and we read a description of the opening setting in North Dakota that is immediately followed visually by the shot being described. At the end of the film, when Vicki announces, "Hello, everybody. This is MRS. NORMAN MAINE!" the shot dissolves back to those words and a description of Vicki on the final page.

Even in the year 2000, it is unusual to find such an overt reminder that the film we are watching was written and crafted by someone. The script itself is a signifier of an implied filmmaker. The descriptions at the beginning and end of the script function as heterodiegetic narration; with Vicki described as the focalizer of the closing scene [12]. The effect serves to distance the audience once again, paradoxically at the climactic emotional moment of the ending, but without the satiric edge of the musical themes and intertitle described above. Moreover, while the script testifies to the film as artifact, it does not overtly signal a particular "personality" as its "author." There is no name on the script, whose story was actually inspired by Selznick’s earlier film What Price Hollywood? Even if the final shot of the script is a reminder of the "implied author" of the film and its words evoke a filmic "narrator," there is no way in the film itself to ascribe these agencies to Selznick, director William Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, or any of the other uncredited writers who had a hand in the writing. (Selznick himself did claim that the film was his idea, but he was quite ready to share credit with Wellman for having brought it off. See Behlmer 96 and 108, especially.) In fact, the presence of the script seems to have been a late addition to the film. It is not mentioned in any of the memos available in print by the usually obsessive Selznick to Wellman, and there is no reference to it in Fredric March’s gift copy of his own shooting script in the March collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Why then evoke such an implied filmmaker at all?

An answer might come through reference to one other factor that is easily overlooked today: the fact that the film is in Technicolor. While film audiences since the 1960s have come to expect color as the default option for filmmakers, such was not the case in the 1930s when the relatively new, expensive, and cumbersome three-color Technicolor system was perfected. The process was most often used for genres such as comedies, swashbucklers, fantasies, and historical epics. Black-and-white film, however, would still be standard for films most associated with contemporary "realism," including tearjerkers. The distinction between the two types of film stock is clear in The Wizard of Oz, where "real" Kansas is in black-and-white while the fantasyland of Oz is in color. Coupled with the presence of the script, then, the use of Technicolor reinforces the "fantasy" aspects of A Star Is Born, including the sheer improbability of Esther Blodgett’s rise to fame. (Selznick himself called it a "Cinderella" story. [Behlmer 96]). The presence of the script and the use of Technicolor, then, are not only elements of narration but hints of an implied filmmaker, an unnamed agent offering implicit cues not to take Esther’s luck too seriously. Overt—non-verbal—marks of narration and authorship reinforce the sense of film as artifact rather than as "reality."