Libertango - The Audience Is Listening

From: damiana_swan Date: May 2nd, 2008 06:59 pm (UTC) (Link)

A voiceover is counted among the big no-no's of film making. (Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean they aren't done.)

They're usually done as an infodump, which is also one of the big no-no's. "Here, we can't be bothered to do the work of writing the screenplay in a way that makes the setting self-explanatory, so we're just going to have a voiceover tell you what we think you're too stupid to figure out for yourself." But even when they're supposed to be something along the lines of what someone's thinking, that's still stuff that falls into Show Don't Tell.

(My partner is in the middle of writing his second screenplay and is also teaching a course in the language of film and animation, so we've been discussing things like this a lot lately.)

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From: libertango Date: May 3rd, 2008 08:07 am (UTC) VO (Link)

"A voiceover is counted among the big no-no's of film making."

Ummm... I get that. I'm asking, to what end? No, I know the answer to that, too. IE, it's mostly "Show, Don't Tell," as you say, but there's also a theoretical structure that says film is a primarily visual medium, and VO implies action that isn't visual. So I guess I'm asking, why does the aversion to VO have any greater force than, "I don't like asparagus."

"Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean they aren't done."

"Unfortunately"? Hm. And:

"...even when they're supposed to be something along the lines of what someone's thinking, that's still stuff that falls into Show Don't Tell."

Consider this list:

A Scanner Darkly. Before Sunset/Before Sunrise. Blade Runner (as released). Casablanca. Citizen Kane. Dear Frankie. Fight Club. Garden State. La Jettee. Laura. Love Actually. Moulin Rouge! Pride & Prejudice (A&E/BBC) (and just about any Austen adaptation). The Princess Bride. The Talented Mr Ripley. Trainspotting. Waitress.

I suggest that's a list of films anyone would be proud of. I suggest that VO is one of many tools for the writer, and that it's not the tool itself that makes the difference between a good and bad movie, for all that some critics would write it so.

To paraphrase Ebert on the topic of length, "No good movie is too talky, no bad movie is terse enough!"

Flip it around. The very epitome of Show, Don't Tell are the films of Ron Fricke (Chronos) and Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi). Maybe Dziga Vertov (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, aka, Man with a Movie Camera). Those movies have many admirers, myself among them, but they didn't exactly set box office records.

The whole thing reminds me of Jakob Nielsen and the idea of "chunking" in web design. Which I've snarked at already. I suspect that some film critic noticed that 90% of movies with voice overs are bad... without realizing that 90% of all movies are bad, and latched on to something that isn't the variable.

In fact, arguably, narration does Show. The whole reason we know, in Dear Frankie, that the viewpoint character is lucid and intelligent is because we hear him as he thinks, and not as he talks. That's true in Princess Bride, as well... The very choice of the book he's reading tells us volumes about Grandpa.

Now, if you want to maintain the position that it's tough to sell a screenplay with VO in it, I'd go along with that. But that's only the equivalent of saying that a bunch of people, commercially strategic, don't like asparagus either. That doesn't truly say whether asparagus is good or bad, rather only whether it's in fashion. (And, truthfully, that's true of "Show, Don't Tell," as well.)

I'll also say that I'd trust Bill Goldman a lot more than I'd trust Syd Field. But hey, that's just me.

Oh, and in re: "can't be bothered" -- one person's "lazy" is another person's "efficient," depending on one's seat on that normative fence. Sometimes getting to the actual story in a quick and efficient way outweighs the calisthenics one must do (and film one must shoot) getting there through other narrative techniques. They didn't seem to object to this as much in the Golden Age between the 1930s and 1950s. Then again, tickets per capita were a lot higher at the time (the only way to adjust for both inflation and population growth). Almost as if they knew what they were doing, eh?

Edited at 2008-05-03 12:16 pm (UTC)

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