Knewness: Cultural Analysis in practice
Mieke Bal on Narratology and Image-Thinking
A conversation
Portrait of Mieke BalMieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, filmmaker, video artist, and curator whose work has moved across narratology, semiotics, visual culture, contemporary art, feminism, psychoanalysis, and migratory culture. Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam, she was a founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and served as Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2005 to 2011. In 2023, she was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She is the author of some fifty books, including Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, first published in English in 1985 and now in its fifth edition; Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999); Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002); and Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (2022).
Alongside her theoretical writing, she has developed an extensive practice in film and video installation, including Becoming Vera (2008), A Long History of Madness (2011–12), Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism (2014), Reasonable Doubt (2016), and the multi-channel installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. Her films and installations have been exhibited internationally, and in 2017 she curated Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness at the Munch Museum in Oslo.
In this conversation, we begin with the relationship between Mieke Bal’s foundational work in narratology and her later practice of image-thinkin. Moving through her films and installations, we consider art’s capacity to “speak back”; the ways trauma can disrupt narrative form; and how migration, cultural difference, and non-linear temporality complicate stable ideas of identity and belonging. We also discuss her engagement with psychoanalysis and the social production of madness, before returning to the reciprocal relation between theory and artistic practice, as well as, to art’s capacity to respond critically across time.
Still of actor Sly Maceo Sampimon from the film REFUGEEDOM: LONELY BUT NOT ALONE, by Mieke Bal and Lena Verhoeff, 2022-23 Abstract Essay film. 24.43’, colour, Dolby sound, voice-over but no dialogue. The film can be watched here. Chennie Huang: Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative is a book you wrote and have revised since its first publication in the late 70s. In it, you established a narratological framework centered on three analytical levels — text, story, and fabula. Within that framework, and in story, you developed concepts like focalization, temporality, and space as indispensable instruments for understanding how narrative produces meaning. In Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh, 2022), you dissect elements of your own films and art installations, testing the coherence of theoretical concepts you established in Narratology. Do you regard the medium of film primarily as a narrative method that generates analytical insight, or as an analytical instrument that necessarily takes narrative form? Perhaps the practice of image-thinking dissolves that distinction?
Michael Ann Holly’s Somewhere Between Art History and Phenomenology: At the Still Point of the Painted World, discussed by Mieke Bal in this conversation. Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2025.Mieke Bal: Thank you for bringing these two books up together. It matters! Narratology is my oldest, the other one my newest — more or less. The older one articulates the theory of narrative as I had developed it in line with, but nevertheless, in some respects critical of, Gérard Genette, in his 1972 book Figures III, in which he uses Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu as his primary example. And the later one demonstrates in what that can result when a careful, precise analysis is done in (artistic) practice. Image-Thinking responds to a challenge I felt when my documentary video-making, with which I started, ended up in "theoretical fictions". There, I responded to — but did not "adapt" — masterworks from cultural heritage. The difference between responding and adapting is precisely the difference between activated reactions and what used to be considered a passive, contemplative "public".
For me, film is one of the many possible media that can facilitate, and can produce, narrative. So can literature, theatre, opera, figurative and even abstract artworks. Although it is often deployed to construct and present narratives, it is not essential, hence, always leading to, narrative. Film is a medium for the production of, but not being by itself, narrative. A medium is a vehicle, a means to do something, and in my film and video work that frequently results in stories, or at least, contents that seem to be narrative, or contain narrative fragments. However, the divisions of longer films into parts that can be installed as exhibitions, which we have frequently practised, makes the narrative quality sometimes a bit dubious. Especially in the installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, which responded to Cervantes's famous literary text, the mode of installing responded to the novel's incoherent narrative—an incoherence that was, according to us as makers, triggered by trauma—by setting the screens in a very disorderly way, avoiding rows. Thus, we questioned the linear narrativity and thereby responded to the literary text with its profoundly messy (non)structure.
But I have never given up on the analytical precision I have been pursuing in my five editions of the Introduction to the Theory of Narrative — a book that started as a sequel of my PhD from 1977 (now about 50 years old). I believe the precision I have constantly been pursuing was meant to do justice to the literary narratives from which I started. But yes, it helps the analytical result to enrich the experience of the work's "second persons": in the first place, readers and/or viewers. The practice I describe in Image-Thinking demonstrates that, I hope. Hence, as your question suggests, the distinction between your two articulations can indeed be considered dissolved if my filmmaking practice convinces viewers; or rather, compels them to act as participants, activated as they are by the curatorial creativity through which the pieces of art can work—as I phrase it. With that phrase, I was following Michael Ann Holly's latest book, where she transforms the term "artwork" into "the work of art", turning a noun that indicates an object into an activity, a verb, that is meant to be enhancing the activity of art. I think it is especially the combination of the concepts of space and focalization, which are both so crucial in exhibitions that induces an active, responsive "second personhood" of the participants to become temporarily "first-persons" — speaking back, as it were, to the way the art enticed them to active responses. For me, this reversal of roles is key to the processes that exhibitions are meant to encourage.
“A medium is a vehicle, a means to do something, and in my film and video work that frequently results in stories, or at least, contents that seem to be narrative, or contain narrative fragments.”
CH: What I find compelling in Image-Thinking and in your films is that they function as sites where theoretical claims are put under pressure rather than simply illustrated. Across works such as Don Quijote, Mille et un jours, and A Long History of Madness, different strands of trauma, migration, and the social production of madness recur in different configurations — sometimes intersecting, sometimes receding. How do you decide, in the making, which of those strands will be allowed to surface most forcefully in a given project and which will remain latent?
MB: You put your finger on the right issue! Indeed, the theoretical claims are never self-evident, nor obviously relevant. In the video work I have produced, the theoretical claims are tested, and as you say, put under pressure. I never just want to “illustrate” them — the concept of illustration itself I reject, for the way it subordinates the narrative and/or theoretical content to something else, like an argument or a story. The noun “illustration” makes the speech — argument, story — produced by the maker more important than what the work, the art piece, does, whereas the “illustration” is only used to enhance the former and make the alleged illustration/example just a confirmation. This is a way of refusing the possibility that the art, the images, the text, can, as I call it, “speak back”, add to, correct, or change something in the primary line of argument or story-telling.
That idea that the piece of art, or its exhibition, can, even must, “speak back” involves a willingness, even eagerness, of the participants — themselves activated through their relationship and response — to facilitate the participation of the images, or their characters or adventures, as well.
This need for the “work of art” to “speak back” to the primary speaker — teacher, curator, or student — becomes especially important when we are facing the painful issue of trauma. I see trauma as socially produced, and therefore, in need of a social restoration of the broken bond. Let me advance one example, which is of the utmost actuality: take the harsh lives of refugees who, having left behind all that was dear to them, are now, lonesome. But in the busy city life of a crowd whose language they don’t speak, they are never entirely alone. Lonely but not alone: there is no more difficult life thinkable.
Madness can thus be seen as socially produced, if only because the foreigners are not addressed, not taken seriously as interlocutors. In a recent film I co-made with a young artist, Lena Verhoeff, that oppressive loneliness of the refugee is figured — to allude to the important key word French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has proposed as “figuration” in his PhD thesis of 1971 — through the video takes conceived outside of the usual dialogue. There are two passages read by a voice-over, one from the Hebrew Bible, which is quite nasty: misogynistic and ethnocentric, and one from the Quran, which is, surprisingly for most people, deeply sympathetic and feminist. But the figures, the refugee and his bullies, and the people on the streets, do not speak at all. Silence, mocking, ignoring, refusing to look the refugee in the face: these are the trauma-inducing social ills.
All this can be considered—as Paris-based psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine does in her illuminating practice and abundant writings—as a social production of madness. And if madness is socially produced, the logical consequence is that society is responsible to cure, to repair it — something Freud thought to be impossible. But through her thinking, writing, and practice, Davoine has proven him wrong. Thanks to her vision of trauma and the need for, and possibility of, helping the traumatised, we [Michelle Williams Gamaker and I] have been able to turn trauma and its curing into a narrative without a simple fabula.
In making that film in 2011, in English, it’s titled A Long History of Madness, we followed the theoretical-analytical lead of Davoine. The traumatised characters [Sissi, Artaud, and others] are played by very gifted actors, and their appearances, small acts, and conversations clearly demonstrate the social aspect of their “madness”. Hence, the aspects of madness that we made to surface in the film were selected by following the argumentation in the serious writing of the analyst.