Is she guilty after all, but we just did not notice? A study on how focalization in the film CLOSET LAND colors the information provided to the viewer of the film

Abstract

How a story is presented to the viewer of a film and how this affects the viewer, has been a subject of discussion for a long time. Focalization is a narratological concept to describe how a story is colored, or from which perspective the viewer or reader experiences a story. This thesis looks at how focalization affects the viewers understanding of the film CLOSET LAND. In this thesis, focalization is considered to be the flow of knowledge a viewer experiences when watching a film, where the story-information provided to the viewer is restricted, usually by a character of the story-world. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how focalization could be examined in film, how the story information provided to the viewer affects the viewer, and how theme of the film is related to focalization. To obtain my research results, I did a literature review and conducted a film analysis. With the use of the literature review, I constructed a model to analyze the focalization in three scenes of CLOSET LAND. The results of the analysis of focalization indicate that the focalization, or how the story information is presented to the viewer, shapes the viewer in a way that he or she will believe that the woman in the film is innocent, and the interrogator falsely accuses her of something she did not do.