What is the Diegesis in Film? Definition and Meaning

Published: November 22, 2024 | Last Updated: November 25, 2024

Diegesis as a transmedial concept

The term “diegesis” has undergone multiple transformations within academia throughout the years, and I won’t go into all the different theoretical nuances here.

Instead, I’ll refer to English Professor Dino Franco Felluga, who defines diegesis as:

A narrative’s time-space continuum, to borrow a term from Star Trek. The diegesis of a narrative is its entire created world. Any narrative includes a diegesis, whether you are reading science fiction, fantasy, mimetic realism, or psychological realism. However, each kind of story will render that time-space continuum in different ways. The suspension of disbelief that we all perform before entering into a fictional world entails an acceptance of a story’s diegesis.

Source: Felluga (2012)

In other words, diegesis is the entire narrative world created in a single film and across multiple stories across time in a shared universe.

Consider franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Marvel Universe, where different stories develop across different timelines, settings, and even in different media (comic books, movies, books, animated movies, toys, and more).

See also re-mediation.

The origin and difference between diegesis and mimesis

The term diegesis is initially found in The Republic by Platon.

Diegesis and mimesis are two fundamental modes of storytelling:

Diegesis is the “telling” of the narrative – where events are narrated or described, often with a clear narrative voice mediating between the story and the audience. The narrator relates events, summarizes action, and can comment on characters’ thoughts and feelings.

Take this scene from Pulp Fiction (1994), where Captain Koons (Christopher Walken) tells a young Butch the story about his father’s gold watch. The monologue is an example of diegesis within the movie’s diegesis.

Mimesis is “showing” – where events are enacted or dramatized directly without obvious narrative mediation, aiming to imitate reality as closely as possible. Rather than being told someone is devastated, we see their reaction through dialogue, action, or behavior.

In film, the mimesis is what the actors are doing. The world or context they are doing it within is the diegesis.

A simple example for comparison

Let’s take a simple example where we have a character, John, who’s angry and who decides to leave the room:

A diegetic approach would be to have a character tell another character about a situation in which “John was angry and stormed out of the room.”

The mimetic version would have an actor act out the situation as John slamming his fist on the table, cursing under his breath, and slamming the door behind him.

Summing Up

In film analysis, diegesis is used as a critical framework to examine what belongs to the story world versus what exists only for the audience. The concept helps differentiate between:

Diegetic elements: Everything within the film’s narrative universe that characters can perceive – dialogue, sounds from visible sources (like a car horn when we see the car), music from visible instruments or radios, and any objects or events in the story world.

Non-diegetic elements: Components added for audience effects that characters cannot perceive – background music score, voice-over narration, title cards, credits, and special effects that enhance mood but aren’t “real” within the story.

This distinction is particularly useful when analyzing:

• Sound design (diegetic vs. non-diegetic sound)
• Narrative structure
• Reality levels within films
• How films construct meaning through the interplay of story-world and audience-only elements

Up Next: More on diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music in film