Serena Epstein | Freelance Creativity » Blog Archive

Voiceover.

1 March 2007 359 views 2 Comments

So the FTC group presentation on Wednesday got me thinking about the different types and functions of voiceover narration. There is a huge difference between the type of voiceover in the beginning of Little Women and the type used in Amelie. There seem to be two basic types of voiceover narration: narration by a character in the film itself and narration by an anonymous outside person. (Much like first-person vs. third-person narration in a novel.) So far so good. But what about function? Voiceovers can be used for any (or all) of these things:

-exposition/establish setting

-imparting information that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent

-plot advancement

-passage of time

-details about characters

There are other possible functions, of course, and filmmakers are constantly inventing new ones. I mentioned Amelie earlier, but the function of the voiceover narration in Amelie is actually extremely unconventional. Personal information about the characters, their habits, and even their thoughts is relayed to the audience through the narration. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another film that’s used narration in quite this way. And this is just one example of an unusual application of voiceover narration, but it obviously has remarkable flexibility as a film device. I think it’d be interesting to examine other films that contain unusual voiceover function. Can anyone think of more of these? I’d love to compile a list and see how and in what direction this aspect of film is developing. Perhaps we can even invent new ways to apply it. So…anyone? Ideas?

2 Comments »

craiggrazianohmygod said:

I think you’ve got something wonderful in this post. Here’s a link to a group of essays that for the most part defend voiceovers: http://www.criterionco.com/asp/in_focus.asp?id=14

And here’s a good excerpt from A Defense—and History—of Voice-Over Narration by Sarah Kozloff, who points out that it’s not just lazy filmmakers that use the technique: Maybe this can be a jumping off point and we could analyze what makes these voiceovers innovative.

I think Jean Luc Godard implements the voice over beautifully. In Band Of Outsiders, he has a dance scene with the three main characters, suddenly the music cuts out and while they dance in silence, a third person omniscient narrator tells us what is running through each person’s head.

Godard’s Alphaville has an amazing voiceover example. The narrator croaks as if he’s been inhaling car exhaust for twenty years straight. The voice not only helps prepare us for the world Godard hopes to convey, the voice is actually a disembodied participant, representing the mechanical paranoid future that so many dystopia films later copy.

# 2 March 2007 at 4:41 pm

craiggrazianohmygod said:

The excerpt didn’t show up, here it is:
So, when the New Waves washed up on American shores, voice-over—along with jump cuts and temporal fluidity—immediately became in vogue with the most respected cult directors. Stanley Kubrick relied heavily on voice-over in Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Barry Lyndon (1975); Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver (1976) and GoodFellas (1990); Arthur Penn in Little Big Man (1970); Terrence Malick in his classics Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998); and Woody Allen in films too numerous to list.

And voice-over remains as firmly entrenched today as ever. In the last few decades, independent filmmakers and studio productions alike have used voice-over narration to convey a personal tone and a postmodern sensibility, notably in Clueless (1995), American Beauty (1999), Fight Club (1999), and Amelie (2001).

# 2 March 2007 at 4:42 pm