Narración y descripción: la naturaleza y función del plano y sintagma en el discurso audiovisual

Abstract

This article aims to rewrite the narration-description dichotomy proceeding from literature in terms of narration, visual description, psychological description, qualification and designation in order for it to be correctly applied to audiovisual discourse. To this end, a distinction is made between three strata: the shot, the syntagm and the discourse. In each of them we differentiate between the nature of the segment, determined by the type of relationship set up amongst the elements that form it, and the regime or function that it fulfils in the fragment that encompasses it. This distinction enables us to understand how descriptive audiovisual discourses can be formed of narrative syntagms or narrative audiovisual discourses from descriptive segments, as well as allowing us to distinguish between singular and habitual actions or between nodes and satellites in narrative discourses. This requires the qualification that description in audiovisual discourse, understood as description of visible qualities, can occur simultaneously to the narration and that audiovisual description does not require, as it does in literature, that the time of the narrative should stop.