The sequence from John Ford's Stagecoach shown in the accompanying stills raises the problem of accounting for the organization or images in an instance of the" classical" fiction film and of proposing the critical terms appropriate for that account The formal features of these images-the framing of shots and their sequencing, the repeti-tion of set-ups, the position of characters, the direction of their glances-can be taken together as a complex structure and understood as a characteristic answer to the rhetorical problem of telling a story, of showing an action to a spectator. Because the significant relations have to do with seeing---both in the ways the characters" see" each other and the way those relations are shown to the spectator-and because their complexity and coherence can be considered as a matter of" point of view," I call the object of this study the" specular text." Explanations of the imagery of the classical narrative film are offered by technical manuals and various theories of editing. Here though, I wish to examine the connection between the act of narration and the imagery, specifically in the matter of the framing and the angle of view determined by set-ups, by characterizing the narrating agency or authority which can be taken to rationalize the presentation of shots. An expla-nation of this kind necessarily involves clarifying in some detail the notion of the" position of the spectator." Thus we must characterize the spec-tator's implied position with respect to the action, the way it is structured, and the specific features of the process of" reading"(though not in the sense