POV in Film

Spoilers for Schindler’s List, Fight Club, and No Country for Old Men.

    

    Going off what we discussed in class when point of view was being introduced, unlike in literature, most films that utilize “first-person” perspective don’t literally display footage as if through the eyes of the protagonist (although there are some exceptions) because that limits how much can be conveyed in one shot — like character emotions, for example. The audience can usually only pick up the main character’s emotions by observing their face, which is physically impossible with literal first-person point of view filming. Cinematographers have to resort to alternative methods of delivering a “first-person” experience, which can sometimes lead to some really ingenious strategies.

   Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, a sordid story about the horrors of the Holocaust and one wealthy German man’s disillusionment with the fallacy of the Third Reich, is shot almost entirely in black and white to create realism and add to the film’s dark historical mood, but one nameless little girl brings in an unexpected splash of color with her red coat as she skillfully makes her way through the streets of Krakow in an aerial shot during the liquidation of the Jewish ghettos. This trick is used to show the perspective of Oskar Schindler as he gazes down at Krakow from atop a hill and spots this innocent toddler amidst all the chaos. The color of her coat draws the audience’s eyes to her, just like how Schindler’s eyes are almost immediately drawn to her as he observes the chaos and murder of the streets below him. Spielberg uses the girl in the red coat to openly display the pure innocence of the victims of the Holocaust in stark black-and-white contrast to the horrors of what they are being subject to.

    Fight Club is a more extreme example. On top of using standard first-person techniques like voice-over narration, director Dave Fincher also portrays a character as an actual person for the overwhelming majority of the film — allowing him to “interact” with people other than the narrator and influence countless events external to the narrator’s mind — and reveals at the very end that he was a figment of the narrator’s imagination the whole time, and that everything he had appeared to have done were actions the narrator himself was responsible for. This unorthodox method also includes sparse “flashes” of the character before he was introduced to show his gradual development within the narrator’s mind, cleverly tapping into the psyche of the protagonist without explicitly showing the film through his eyes.

    The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a dark thriller about an unlucky man on running from psychopathic serial killer named Anton Chigurh, who stops at nothing to kill his prey. Although the main character confronts Chigurh physically multiple times throughout the film, he never actually sees the man’s face. His attacker only shoots at him from the shadows or from far enough away that he would be imperceptible. There is not a single shot in the film in which Chigurh’s appearance is visible to the main character, which allows the viewers to see him as the protagonist does: a faceless, emotionless, unstoppable force of nature.

    

    The camera may not always provide as many opportunities for creative expression in comparison to the pen, but skilled filmmakers continue to push the boundaries of cinematography’s possibilities every decade. These clever filming techniques used to portray first-person perspective may be sparse, but their number will surely continue to grow as film theory and technology continues to develop.