Sarah Kozloff pretty well persuaded me about the overall neatness of “voice over narration”, but I’m starting pretty well from square one as far as this sort of thing goes.. so I’m susceptible to bias. I’m also hopelessly uncultured and oblivious to the finer details of filmography, so thinking about it this intensely is new to me. (Ironically, when I first began pondering along these lines, “The Triplets of Belville” came to mind, which is actually a movie that doesn’t include any words, instead relying on images to convey the message- pretty much the opposite of a movie the utilizes voice over narration). Anyhow, I was never a fan of the Christmas Story and I accidently fell asleep before the end of “Stranger than Fiction” so I will need to expand my cinematic horizons and check some of these type of films soon.

I can see how voice over narration isn’t “noble” enough for some people.. it seems showing something without words is inherently harder than just spitting it out, but that’s no reason to completely discount it. (It’s almost like taking the elevator v. the stairs- just because I take the elevator to floor 7 instead of huffing and puffing up the stairs, doesn’t mean I’m a lesser person than the overachiever across the hall who does. And least I hope not.) From the sounds of it, voice over narration is typically overgeneralized as spoon feeding the viewer.

Anyhow, Kozloff writes like she knows what she’s talking about. So I’ll stop babbling a pick out a couple of her points I annotated.

“Regardless of how much the narrator speaks, and regardless of whether he or she ever actually recounts the action of the story, we are so familiar with the structure of the narratives that the speech act as a whole is implied by the presence of any one of the six elements.”

This quote, from the intro we read, pretty will describes my experience with voice over narration- it’s so normal, I just don’t notice it. And I think voice over narration deserves a little more respect than that.

“Probably because of its association with authoritative, voice-of-God narrators, voice-over has been charged with enforcing ideological biases, restricting the viewers’ ability to interpret
onscreen events freely for themselves. Thus, during the apogee of “direct cinema,” influential documentary theorists and filmmakers threw off voice-over as inherently patriarchal, monolithic, and coercive.”

I think I picked this quote out because it’s such an ambitious claim. It’s also an ambitious claim that I’d really like to believe. The two articles we read detail pretty throughly how voice over narration has been historically slighted pretty harshly- at least there was a good reason behind it.

“Voice-over narration is no more or less inherently valuable or cinematic then any other element of film. And when this device is well-executed, it opens up inimitable avenues for filmmakers.Voice-over is notoriously useful for efficiently conveying expositional or historical information, for instance.”

I like that this quote so closely followed the one comparing voice over narrations to the voice of god (who is forever Alan Rickman in my mind). It leads me to think, for all the other claims she’s made, the author is a pretty sensible person, and I trust what’s she’s told me in her articles. Kozloff defends voice over narration, but doesn’t raise it up on a pedestal, which gives her arguments a certain amount of legitimacy.