Non-diegetic insert

In film, diegesis refers to the story world, and the events that occur within it. Thus, non-diegesis are things which occur outside the story-world.

A Non-diegetic insert is a film technique that combines a shot or a series of shots cut into a sequence, showing objects represented as being outside the space of the narrative. Put more simply, a non-diegetic insert is a scene that is outside the story world which is "inserted" into the story world. ^[1] Diegetic could also refer to sound in media or film studies. The term non-diegetic insert was delineated by film theorist Christian Metz in his typology of film editing known as Grand Syntagmatique. Metz classified non-diegetic inserts as a specific type of autonomous shot; differentiating it from other kinds of autonomous shots such as the single-shot sequence, the displaced diegetic insert, the subjective insert, and the explanatory insert. ^[2]

Examples

• Three images shown during the disastrous opening night of the play in The Band Wagon , as a metaphor to highlight how much of a flop the show is.
• Sky sequences shown in Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
• Most famously in The Great Train Robbery a bandit, either following the character's death or before the narrative began, shot his gun directly at the audience.
• Starting scene of Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times .

References

1. Rowe, Allan (1996). "Film, Form, and Narrative". In Nelmes, Jill (ed.). An Introduction to Film Studies. Routledge. p. 108. ISBN   9780415173100.
2. Stam, Robert; Burgoyne, Robert; Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1992). New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Beyond. p. 41. ISBN   9780415065948.