Our Narrator, who art in Fabulas

The question “does film require a narrator?” is interesting mainly because it raises other important questions. It also forces us to examine our film viewing experience and try to determine why we follow films the way we do. Is there a train a thought we're following? The power of the image versus the power of langauge again come into conflict. Does film have a singular narrator, implied or not, who guides us through the film, or does the film simply guide itself? They seem at first to just be two different ways of speaking, but in fact there are distinctions which need to be made if we are to speak at all meaningfully about agency in film. For example, Chatman's notion of film communicating to the viewer gives film that agency. I initially agree with Chatman because I feel guided through narrative, and I think of narratives as communicating to the viewer in some way.
I also think this question is more theological than we realize. To question whether or not a viewer following along segments of film is guided by a narrator seems equivalent to me to asking whether a person watching their life go by is instructed by a kind of cosmic narrator. In fact, Bordwell's appeal to Occam's razor in affirming that he doesn't need a narrator in the concluding paragraph of his article assures me that he has these concerns in mind. What may or may not be a problem is the fact that he attributes agency to film, whereas Chatman says that's basically a way of saying there's always an implied narrator. However, while I agree with Bordwell's theology, I agree with Chatman's theory of narrative. I'm optimistic with both Bordwell and Chatman that film has the capabilities to present literary narrative, using a narrator of course.