Endnote 297: the mute Greek chorus
The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone—a lazy student but very bright girl—to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive.
Context
The entire endnote: the figurant concept's earlier textual appearance — the concept, not the word (see Flags). Boone's reading has every element the wraith will later assemble for Gately in 162: mute background presences, hanging "superfluously around the film's edges," seen but never heard, their silence itself the meaning. What 162's wraith delivers as film theory ("the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner") a bright-but-lazy student here derives unaided from one of Himself's genre's conventions, during a viewing of somebody else's cartridge — "which strikes Hal as perceptive": the auteur's son endorses the figurant reading textually well before the auteur's ghost lectures on it. The note's frame is also an audibility triage in miniature — the Mother Superior's "desire to silence the novitiate" is the film's plot, and the silenced brown-cowled extras are its form. Cross-refs: 162 (whose spine entry points back to this raw); 140 scene-side.