Subjective Storytelling and Audience Connection
Cinema creates character psychology collaboratively. The filmmakers supply the dots, and invite the audience to draw the lines. We both contribute, so we share ownership.
The difference between Cinema and Novels
Superficially, novels and movies seem very similar. Certainly, many people seem to think that, if something works as a novel, it should be easy to simply transcribe it into a script for a movie.
But that’s far from the truth. Novels and cinema are very different, and in at least one crucial way, they are the opposite of each other.
That crucial difference lies in how they treat the exterior world and the interior world. Novels can easily make the character’s interior world explicit, while asking us to fill out the exterior world.
Cinema does the opposite. It makes the exterior explicit and asks us to fill out the interior world.
A novelist might write, ‘A late spring snow sprinkled a dusting of white over the dark forest’ – asking us to fill in the picture ourselves.
A single shot in cinema might show you every drifting snowflake, the texture of the bark on every tree trunk, snow gathering on fragile branches and so on. Much more than we could consciously comprehend.
Conversely, prose can readily take us behind a character’s eyes to reveal every feeling, every thought, and every decision through the author’s voice. Cinema does the opposite. It withholds this information and relies on us to supply it.
When cinema tries to emulate prose’s ability to reveal the interior, you end up with verbose voice-over, or lengthy scenes of clumsy psychological exposition where a character explains themselves to us by explaining themselves to another character.
Instead, cinema uses projection to get us to supply the inner monologue, thoughts and feelings of a character, through a process known as the Kuleshov Effect.
See: Giving Your POV a Sandwich.
But what about Voice-Over?
Voice-over may seem to marry the strengths of cinema and prose, but voice-over in cinema almost always distances us from the character. Rather than put us inside the character’s head, it inserts itself between us and the character.
All too often it blocks our impulse to work out what’s happening for ourselves. Instead of getting the audience to actively understand a character, voice-over relieves us of that pleasure. Even when it’s pleasurable, I often find myself admiring the words and the delivery more than the content.
(Not always true – see masterful use of voice-over in the ‘Henry’s last frantic day as a wise guy’ sequence from Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’.)
When it works, voice-over is often better as an authorial voice, commenting on the action rather than presuming to reveal the inner thoughts of the character. Quite often as a minor third party. Sometimes, so minor that we never see them on screen.
Cinema has its own, much more powerful tools for achieving subjectivity and identification. Instead of explaining, cinema works best when it withholds or conceals the character’s inner life, and asks us to collaborate in completing the picture.
This is built on something called Theory of Mind, which is our powerful impulse to ascribe meaning to unexplained action. For a deeper look at this, see Theory of Mind
The simplest way cinema provides the dots, and asks us to draw the lines, is the Point of View Sandwich.
What’s a POV sandwich?
The classic POV Sandwich consists of three shots:
- Who’s looking.
- What they see.
- How they react.
Let’s take a famous example.
Psycho – the classic Example
One of the most influential examples of the POV sandwich occurs in Hitchcock’s film Psycho, when Norman Bates pushes the car containing Marion Crane’s body into the swamp.
We know that this sequence was very important to Hitchcock, because Hitchcock relied on his own production company for the funding of the film, and spent around 20% of the total budget on the mechanism to control the car’s descent into the swamp. A sequence that has only two setups and runs just on a minute.
After discovering Marion’s brutally murdered body in the shower, Norman wraps up her body and puts her and what’s left of the money she stole into the boot of her new car, drives it to the swamp, and pushes it in. The car starts to sink out of sight.
Hitchcock cuts between a series of POV Sandwiches of Norman chewing nuts (shots 1 & 3 above), watching the car sink into the swamp (Shot 2).
But then the car stops, only half-submerged (shot 2).
Norman abruptly stops chewing, and looks around anxiously (shot 3). The car doesn’t budge (shot 2 again). Norman, worried (shot 3). Then, with a gurgle, the car finally goes under (shot 2), and we cut back to Norman’s CU to see a tiny bit of relief cross his face (shot 3).
Just as Kuleshov’s audiences found themselves projecting their own feelings into Mozhukhin’s minimal performance, in Psycho, we find ourselves, almost against our will, empathising with Norman’s dilemma as he watches the car start to sink, stop, then finally go under. We share his anxiety, and then his relief.
Yet this is a character we hardly know and, more importantly, don’t much like. We’re reeling from Marion Crane’s death – and despite the mythology, it’s not just because of the famous shower sequence. We were set up to believe that Marion was the central character, and despite her moral ambiguity – she was meeting a man for illicit sex in hotel rooms in her lunch hour, and then stole $40,000 from a sleazy customer so she could be with her beau – we have gradually come to accept, and even like her. Especially when she has to deal with that weirdo Bates.
And then, just 45 minutes into the story, she’s snatched away from us.
And now we’re being asked to empathise with a strange and somewhat creepy man who is, at the very least, a voyeur, and could be much more. But such is the power of the Kuleshov effect that we all share Norman’s anxiety as the car refuses to sink.
[To be fair, the identification we feel with Bates at this point doesn’t come completely out of the blue – Hitchcock has carefully set us up for the switch through the morally ambiguous experience of sharing in Bates’ voyeurism as Marion gets undressed, and through Norman’s ‘Mother, what have you done?!’ panic after he discovers Marion’s body. But the big shift comes during the car-in-the-swamp sequence.]
So Ubiquitous it has become Invisible
There are many other powerful examples of this technique. The scuba-diving sequence in The Graduate. Turning the man into the robot sequence in Robocop. ‘Henry’s last day as a wise guy’ sequence in Goodfellas.
It’s become grammar. We don’t see it anymore.
In Peter Weir’s Witness he uses this technique masterfully during an extended sequence in the 30th St Station in Philadelphia that sets up a young boy as the protagonist, then shows us the brutal crime that sends the story in a whole new direction through his eyes, before changing protagonists midstream to Harrison Ford’s character.
For an extended analysis of this and other examples, see Subjective Storytelling: Five EXAMPLES.
What is perceived vs what is seen
The more audiences become accustomed to the use of the POV sandwich and other subjective cinematic tropes, the more filmmakers bend them.
One way is by adding a level of concealment to the storytelling.
The POV sandwich invites the audience to ‘join the dots’ by showing what the character experiences, but hiding what they feel and think.
But what if the character’s experience is also partially concealed? Then we are being asked to speculate on the character’s own speculation about what they can only partially see.
For example, our character (Zoe) could be at a party trying to overhear a conversation between her partner and her partner’s ex, when someone steps in the way and blocks her. Now, from Zoe’s POV (and that’s the POV we’re following at the moment) the possibilities for what they might be talking about suddenly vastly expand . Especially if she that thinks they’re aware that she can no longer see or hear them.
Uncertainty is added to Zoe’s insecurity. And we’ve all felt both. So we all donate our experiences and feelings to Zoe.
Roman Polanski’s film ROSEMARY’S BABY uses this technique multiple times, as described in this post: The Cine-Files » Teaching Rosemary’s Baby
Perhaps the most famous example is the moment after Rosemary has announced her pregnancy to the Castavets and the rest of (what we realise later to be) the coven, only for Minnie Castavets (Ruth Gordon) to insist on making an appointment with ‘their’ doctor on the phone in Rosemary’s bedroom. Rosemary is trying to watch the call (as are we of course), but Polanski frames the shot so that Minnie is partially obscured by the door frame.
Director or Writer?
The responsibility for this piece of cinematic language is often presumed to fall on the director’s side of the imaginary (and foolish) director/writer divide. However, it needs to be set up in the script.
If the writer doesn’t at least imply it in the script, somebody with more power than insight will force them to write voice-over or clumsy expositional dialogue scenes to give the same information in a much less interesting way.
