On Voiceovers and Narrators

by Oliver Spicer

I have a scrappy version of Syd Field’s book ‘Screenplay' - bought in a charity shop, definitely serving its past life in a library due to a label on its side. Probably replaced due to it being an outdated edition, shown by an exclamation on the cover that states it has a brand new chapter on writing with computers - which makes sense for its print date of 1984. But to this day its contents is still significant.

On it’s first page, the introduction of ‘What is a screenplay’ that the lineage of previous aspirational filmmakers has read, it states the main difference between a script and a novel:

“…If you look at a novel and try to define its essential nature, you see that the dramatic action, the story line, usually takes place inside the head of the main character. We are privy to the character’s thoughts, feelings, words, actions, memories, dreams, hopes, ambitions, opinions, and more…” (Syd Field: Screenplay, Third Edition, Page 1)

Field goes on to explain how film is a different art-form from the novel or play due to its dealing with the language of pictures instead of words. But this approach neglects that many films benefit from the use of narration. Examples that show voicerover is not a cheap way to deliver exposition - but instead can align the spectator with a complex character, drawing them into the tone of the film through the style of dialogue and delivery used to narrate.

A Brief History of Speaking Over Images.

(Sarah Kozloff: Ancestors, Influences, and Development in ‘Invisible Storytellers, 1988. page 23-37)

If you want to look at the history of voice-over narration there are many techniques that are similar to it but few that fully embrace the form until the late 20th century.

We can begin by claiming that the vocal delivery of many stories is the ancestor to the narrator in cinema. One can imagine listening to the Odyssey being recited in Ancient Greece, the ‘Tayu’ in Kabuki theater in Japan that sets the scene, or the soliloquies in Shakespeare that see characters talking directly to the audience. And this practice of vocalising stories would continue in early film, with ‘Lecturers’ that provided notes to the audience alongside the film - essential due to the lack of sound and as the language of cinema was still premature to tell complicated stories. But lecturers were far from perfect because much like the live-music accompanying films at the time, the experience varied widely depending on the cinema - with lecturers often not given notes on what to say and sometimes not even watching the film before giving commentary.

Intertitles were then seen as a way to standardise the process of delivering information to the audience, popularised between 1910 and 1927 by filmmakers such as Buster Keaton, D.W Griffith, and Louis Weber. But this is a retreat from true audio narration.

When in 1927 The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland) became the first feature to perform synchronised dialogue, it then became possible to create voiceover. But the shift from synchronised in-world dialogue to a voice emitted between the narrative space and the spectator would take some time. Newsreels that run before feature films often utilised an authoritative ‘voice of god’ that explained the documentary footage, such as The March of Time (Time Inc, 1931-1945) that was parodied in the opening of Citizen Kane (Orson Wells, 1945) to make Kane’s story feel grounded in reality. But before symbolic sleds and newspaper empires there was The Power and the Glory (William K Howard, 1933) : an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel which can be said to be the first use of voiceover as well as an inspiration for Citizen Kane due to its protagonist telling the story of the life and death of his powerful friend over the top of scenes, at points speaking over the dialogue present.

Yet this is still not the voiceover that elevates a film and that offers an otherwise impossible perspective into a character’s inner voice. For this we need to look at pieces of cinema that drove the development of the voiceover and used it to their advantage.

French to Cantonese

The French New Wave tried to beat up the classical form of cinema from every direction possible. One way was narrative which saw overly simplistic stories that jumped around in time, another was editing through the use of everything from jump-cuts to montages of still images, and the one we are of course interested is its unique style of narration. Examples include the driving sequences in Breathless(Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) and the interior monologue in Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) that both possess a poetic but honest form of thought for their protagonists. The opening of breathless mixes direct address (looking at the camera and speaking) with dialogue and voiceover as Michel Poiccard drives to prepare the audience for the discontinuity throughout the film. Whilst Cleo looks in the mirror and thinks to herself that ‘Ugliness is a kind of death’, offering a break to the narrative that sees the character reflecting on the events that have transpired internally. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1966) is another french-new wave film comprised entirely of still images (apart from a single shot of a tear) with voiceover - showing how even a slide show presentation can be captivating with the right delivery. Here is a shift in cinema to an internal voiceover, where the audience are spying in on the secret thoughts and feelings of a character.

This style of voiceover can be seen as especially influential for director Wong Kar-Wai, with his films having a strong sense of introspective-ness due to having more internal voiceover from characters than dialogue. Characters think about the past and future instead of performing actions, leading to more tension in narratives due to the lack of resolution - which might risk becoming annoying if not for the interesting expressions the characters use to narrate that would only exist as the concluding line to most other films. It is impossible to separate the dreamy urban visuals from this director, but sound and especially narration has a large impact of the atmosphere of his films - including Chungking Express(1994) , Days of Being Wild(1990) and In The Mood for Love(2000)

Goodfellas, Godfathers and Yellow Cabs.

The New Hollywood period in America also saw creative uses of visuals and audio, with recently established film schools producing directors such as Scorsese, Coppola, and George Lucas that shifted the techniques utilised in Hollywood by incorporating other cinematic movements around the world into the traditional film recipe.

Scorsese’s catalogue of films use voice-over to its full power. Taxi Driver(1976) transfers the dialogue from the cynical detective protagonists of the Noir period to the streets of New York - with Travis Bickle giving his true thoughts about the city as he becomes more troubled by the events he witnesses everyday, eventually leading to delirium about his life. Here is when voiceover is being used to peer into the head of a character, even if the questionable anti-hero archetypes of the New Hollywood period.

Another good example by Scorsese is Goodfellas(1990) , which features voice-over narration from the protagonist Henry Hill as he joins and learns about the criminal underworld of the mafia. This technique is paired with other uses of film form that are strongly associated with the voiceover, including the flash back (with the opening scene of Goodfellas that features the mobsters murdering someone stuffed inside their car trunk occurring halfway through the actual story), as well as freeze frames and direct address that have become staple for character narration.

In fact it can be argued that it is the voice-over throughout the film that contrasts it with The Godfather(Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) , the other iconic mob film. Whilst Coppola has used voiceover for many of his other projects such as Apocalypse Now(1979) , it is quite absent from his most popular film - giving us a more objective view of the same topic than Goodfellas. The baptism scene can be said to be lingering on the technique of voice-over, utilising it to provide a counterpoint to the brutal murders. But it does not create the same intimacy achieved in Goodfellas, as if you are part of the gangster family.

Knowledge and Postmodernism

Among the list of the most iconic films that feature voiceover, there are also many instances where a more old fashioned narrator is implemented. One example is The Shawshank Redemption(Frank Darabont, 1994) that has Morgan Freeman as his character ‘Red’ retelling the story of Andy from a position in the future. This can be seen as resembling the ‘voice of god’ narration in documentary filmmaking previously mentioned, with Red acting as a knowledgeable figure on prison life due to his long time incarcerated. He understands the culture of the fictional Shawshank prison and educates both Andy and the audience, as well as offering personal insights that also show his compassion.

It is here where the basis of the narrator can be seen, as using voiceover for exposition delivers both knowledge on a world where an audience may be inexperienced with (The Mafia, Prison, War) and can not just be understood through visuals - but with that a gift of character is also given, which each phrase a narrator uses and the parts of a story they choose to dwell on auditorily showing what they value.

But with postmodern films that question the structures of reality, the implementation of voiceover narration brings its own unique insights. Often these films are purposefully hard to understand narratives to provoke thought and ambiguity: with the voiceover of Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner(Ridley Scott, 1982) being removed in later releases due to restricting the ruminating atmosphere that the film is now known for. And when voiceover is included, it is often to highlight the untrustworthy nature of memory and thought - with examples including Fight Club(David Fincher, 1999) and Knives Out(Rian Johnson, 2019) . It is possibly harder to come across a trustful narrator in modern cinema than an untrustworthy one, but it may have always been that way and might be a better reflection of human thought.

Conclusion: Where Is the Narrator?

Over the course of cinema there has then been shifts in the techniques for narration, changes in perspectives, and differences in knowledge presented to the audience. Narrators are shown to be existing outside of the story, or in a different time and place to the on-screen narrative. This is all made possible as the narrator does not exist in the diegetic world of the film, but instead the conventions of story that have been developed for far longer than trips to the moon and trains leaving stations. There is no disruption to the believability of a film if narration is used well due to this distinction, as long as the fabric of the story lies in tact then an audience can still be immersed as long as it follows the wider rules of narration and thought instead of just cinema.

Through the multiplicity of examples shown, it is clear that voiceover narration is bound to cinema even if not utilised in a film. The choices in editing, sound, and visuals are in a sense a type of narration that sits beside the audience member and whispers how they should be feeling. Yet when this is not enough an actual voice from the story must be heard. Voiceover should not be relegated to just the opening of films as the camera sweeps through clouds to the starting point of the narrative, but instead used to express what is impossible to express in the still incomplete language of visuals.

by Oliver Spicer, December 2022