Let's examine another crucial aspect of cinematic storytelling—point of view. While literary point of view is often easy to identify, pinning down a film’s point of view is much more challenging.
POINT OF VIEW
In both literature and film, issues of point of view are highly dependent on technique of narration. We have already identified the author as the principal source of narration in literary works, but there is another dimension to that narration—the author selects a point of view from which the story is told. In literature, point of view is traditionally articulated through the author’s use of pronouns that indicate who readers’ sympathies are supposed to align with: first person point of view is indicated through repeated use of “I” and “me” and “my.” Third person narration is signified through “he” or “she” or use of the characters’ names. Second person, though a rare occurrence, would be signaled through reliance on “you.” However, point of view is more complicated than just what pronouns appear on the page; changes in point of view affect how we, as readers, perceive the story and the characters. According to Robert Stam, “More important than the grammatical ‘person’ is authorial control of intimacy and distance, the calibration of access to characters’ knowledge and consciousness, all issues which function above and beyond and below the issue of grammatical ‘person.’”
In general, first person is presumed to be more intimate than other points of view, encouraging the reader to view the novel’s events through the lens of its central character/narrator. First person perspective allows readers to get close to the character, but also invites unreliability—how do we know that the narrator is telling the truth? The story is thus bound by the limitations of the first person narrator. Third person narration is also quite common, but even this has variations. Some third person novels largely restrict themselves to what one character knows, but other novels take a more panoramic view, offering the perspectives of a number of different characters. Because of their rarity, second person novels are harder to pin down, but one useful example might illustrate its value: Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, a novel about a low-level publishing executive in the 1980s, is told in second person. It reinforces the novel’s critiques of narcissism that proliferated in the decade, with the repeated use of “you” creating the effect of relentlessly staring into a mirror. All of these separate points of view change the story dramatically because they govern a number of the novelist’s other choices.
Point of view in cinema is even more complicated. As an exercise, let’s try to apply some of literature’s point of view framework to cinema. Begin with first person point of view: can a film express first person point of view using its stylistic tools? The answer is obviously yes. The most common way is through the representation of a subjective shot taken from the point of view of a single character, showing us what that character sees. A visual signifier like the frame of a pair of binoculars or a scope in a combat film are useful indicators—the shot at left from Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1968) and the one at right from Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014) offer examples.
Often, the image merely conveys what a character sees without such obvious intervention. The easiest way to see this in action is through a chain of two shots: the first shows the individual character, who looks off screen in a particular direction. The second shows a new piece of information, which we interpret to be what the character sees. Two visually unrelated pieces of information are linked through the off-screen look and the cut that joins them. It is a reflection of point of view. The pair of images from Budd Boetticher’s Decision at Sundown (1957) below show this in action. While running from a gunfighter, Bart Allison (Randolph Scott) looks ahead and off-frame right; the reverse shot shows what he sees, the wagon, which may provide cover from the shooting.
Filmmakers have often explored subjective cinema through extreme examples of restricted first person point of view. Director Robert Montgomery’s adaptation of The Lady in the Lake (1946), based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, uses an entirely subjective camera for the film’s duration. The detective Phillip Marlowe (Montgomery also stars) is the camera; his voice is heard off screen, and the other characters look directly into the lens to address him. Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947) uses a similar structure for the first twenty-five minutes of the film, but abandons the device partway through. Dark Passage is pictured below, with female lead Irene (Lauren Bacall) looking directly into the lens to address Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) on the left, and the later appearance of Bogart himself on screen after the point of view leaves his subjectivity.
As an example, Dark Passage indicates one of the complexities of film point of view—it has no need to restrict itself to just one. In literature, point of view is generally stable. It would be difficult to justify a novel taking place entirely in third person, except for one chapter in the middle told in first person, for instance. Authors in literature tend to adopt a point of view and then stick with it. Cinema has no such obligation. Daves’s film can begin by using an extreme signifier of subjective, first person point of view, but then move out of subjectivity more or less with ease. In fact, his restriction to subjectivity is one of the things that makes Dark Passage exceptional—far more common practice demands that cinema adjusts point of view more or less at will. Return to the above example from Decision at Sundown for a moment; the second shot reflects what the character sees, and is taken from his point of view. But what about the first one, where he looks off screen? That is more or less a kind of third person point of view that simply shows us the character looking, visually describing his actions in the way a writer might tell us through language that he looked off into the distance.
However, the camera’s individual shots are not the only point of view currency in cinema. According to Robert Stam, “Any comprehensive theory of cinematic point of view must take into account film’s multitrack and multiform nature. Each and every filmic track and procedure – camera angle, focal length, music, performance, mise-en-scene, and costume – can convey a point of view.” We’ve already discussed how specific shots can express point of view, but think about music. Score guides emotion; it is supposed to have an effect on you as a viewer, but the score is often also used to underline the emotion that the character is feeling. Take Indiana Jones, for instance. His theme music, which he doesn’t hear, often accompanies moments of adrenaline-pumping action as he gains the upper hand against the film’s villains. The music expresses an aspect of his point of view. The way he reaches back for his trademark fedora, grabbing it in the nick of time before the trapdoor closes, may also indicate point of view because the hat is so closely associated with his character.
Film is a medium of multiplicity that relies on a number of different simultaneous stylistic markers to communicate story information. This lends credence to Stam’s argument that “Despite fidelity criticism’s discourse of loss, the cinema has not lesser but rather greater resources for expression than the novel, and this is quite independent of what actual filmmakers have actually done with these resources.”
Filmmakers have a number of tools available to them to express character point of view. In the video commentary at right, I examine director James Gray’s use of various stylistic techniques in a crucial scene midway through his 2007 crime thriller We Own The Night, during which Joaquin Phoenix’s nightclub owner Bobby goes undercover while wearing a wire, hoping to catch a lethal drug dealer in a crime. The sequence is highly subjective, as Gray uses every tool available to him to place us, the audience, inside Bobby’s highly stressful experience.
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This short scene from We Own the Night indicates how filmmakers move in and out of subjective point of view seamlessly, adjusting audiences’ relationships to characters with each new shot, edit, use of music, sound effect, line of dialogue, costume piece, lighting, set design, or performance.
clip quiz - point of view
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
DEAD RECKONING (1946, Cromwell)
The noir film Dead Reckoning closely identifies with the point of view of its central character Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart). How does it do that in this clip from the opening scene? What formal tools tell you we are following this character’s point of view? |
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DARK PASSAGE (1947, DAVES)
What is the point of view of this sequence from Dark Passage, and how do you know? Be specific about what you see and hear in the clip. |
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FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965, Leone)
There are two central characters in the spaghetti Western For A Few Dollars More. In this scene, where do you see the point of view split between Monco (Clint Eastwood, brown hat and cigar) and Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef, black hat and mustache)? How does the sequence tell you that you are seeing both? |
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OCEAN'S ELEVEN (2001, Soderbergh)
Identify three single moments of point of view from this clip of Ocean’s Eleven, and express how the film uses its various tools of narration to express that; you have eleven characters to choose from, so be specific. |
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POINT OF VIEW AND nightcrawler
At a transitional moment in Nightcrawler (2014, Gilroy), the bizarre protagonist Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) describes his burgeoning understanding of the value of composing interesting and effective images: “I'm focusing on framing. A proper frame not only draws the eye into a picture, but keeps it there longer, dissolving the barrier between the subject and the outside of the frame.” Sometimes, films can distill the entire thematic focus down into a line of dialogue or a single image. In this moment, Lou delivers the film’s key idea: that the cinematic image can blur the distinction between the person inside the frame and the person outside of it.
This is essentially what Nightcrawler is up to, as it takes its deeply weird, near sociopathic anti-hero Lou, who backs into a career as a “stringer,” a freelance videographer who specializes in capturing graphic, violent, dramatic images of car accidents, fires, and murder scenes to sell to local news broadcasts. He stumbles onto the idea without a specific passion for the visual, but one develops as soon as he realizes there’s money to be made in this business, especially for someone like him—single-minded in his focus and without a shred of human empathy.
Nightcrawler is really a movie about point of view: what do we see, and whose perspective do we see it from? Throughout, the direction by its writer Dan Gilroy and the cinematography by veteran cameraman Robert Elswit emphasize Lou’s perspective through a handful of reliable techniques. Early on, Lou pulls over to the side of the highway to witness a fiery car accident; as his soon-to-be-rival stringer Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) pulls up to get the shot he needs, Lou looks on in fascination. A shot of Lou, centrally framed and in sharp focus to the exclusion of the blur around him, looking at the accident shows us how interested he is; in the reverse shot, the camera is positioned over his shoulder, with him out of focus. The burning car in the background, though, is crystal clear. An idea is dawning on him.
Though it’s clear from the outset that Lou is intense and more than a little off, the depths of his sociopathy are revealed slowly. This is where point of view really matters; you’ve been encouraged to identify with him through shots like the two above—he’s also the film’s protagonist, so you naturally do this—but that point of view is hopelessly corrupted morally, especially as his actions become more and more objectionable. By the time he is creeping into a mansion where he has just witnessed three people be murdered, carrying his camera on his hip, you’re stuck with him. You identify with this character, and can’t get out. When you see the blood on the ground, you see it through his viewfinder. Lou’s way of seeing the world has merged with yours, just as he told you it would in his explanation of what he was learning about framing.
One of the most common ways that filmmakers establish point of view is through the use of subjective shots. As Lou waits in his car near the end of the film to capture a police shootout and subsequent chase with the suspects behind the mansion murders, which he has set up himself, this subjectivity is on display. In the first shot, we get a close-up of Lou looking out the window; in the next one, we see what he sees, as one of the suspects makes his appearance outside of his apartment.
Through shots like this, Nightcrawler implicates you in Lou’s morally dubious behavior. When there is no separation between his point of view and yours, you have nowhere else to turn. The one exception to that is Lou’s television contact, Nina (Rene Russo), the station manager where he sells his footage. As Lou begins to draw Nina further into his morally compromised approach to getting the most dramatic images, largely because she needs the help with the ratings, she begins to regret the arrangement. In a crucial dinner scene at a Mexican restaurant, Lou blackmails Nina not only into continuing (and expanding) their business relationship, but he also coerces her into a sexual one. To the extent that Nightcrawler steps outside of Lou’s perspective, it comes in scenes like this, where what he proposes is so vile and monstrous, you have no choice but to feel for Nina. A two-shot of them at the table that shows Nina’s disgusted, but defeated look puts the scene squarely in her point of view.
Lou is like a gravitational force for point of view. The film eventually begins to see everything his way. An early indication is when Lou stands on the set of the news show after selling Nina another piece of dramatic footage; a shot shows him in crisp high definition through the lens of one of the on-set cameras. Later on, at a moment of high tension, when Lou’s business empire seems under threat, he smashes the mirror in his apartment, a final image of him fractured into three pieces a visual representation of his twisted psychology. The two images taken together illustrate the differences in Lou’s public persona and private persona: on the surface, he’s intense, intelligent, and in control, but under the surface, he’s consumed by rage.
This film draws attention to the complexity of film point of view, which is closely related to audience identification. The elements of cinematic storytelling render point of view difficult to pin down, but also, thrilling to analyze because of the important changes that can take place at a moment-to-moment basis. According to Robert Stam, this is a key feature of cinema’s ability to render point of view: “the various tracks can act redundantly and in tandem or in creative tension, and each choice inflects the point of view.” In cinema, point of view is always a live issue.