Cinema: Subjective, Objective Points of View
A character rendered the conduit into story
From Three Colors Blue. 1993. Director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenwriters Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Cinematography Sławomir Idziak.
On the page, the writer may adopt a first person narrative POV, a subjective I, who as narrator takes us through the story in their perception. We are ‘with’ them whether we care for them or not. Perhaps we empathize, perhaps we don’t. Love or loathe them, since there is only one I we are, for better or worse, stuck with them.
Characters, on the other hand, might be written as an objective he, she, or they. If so, as everyone knows, the author is writing in the third person.
When we follow several such characters but are kept at a distance, unaware of too much of what they are perceiving, feeling, or thinking—as if we were merely witnessing or observing them—it can be said that the writer is utilizing a third person objective point of view. Less intense, usually, than the subjective mode (depending on the stakes of the story, perhaps).
If, on the other hand, we do know what these characters are perceiving, thinking, and feeling—while at the same time they lack such godlike insight into the minds and hearts of each other—then the writer has chosen a third person omniscient point of view.
When we see through the eyes of a single character, hear their thoughts, know what they know and no more, when they in effect constitute our conduit into the story, its events, and its world, yet they are not an I but a he, she, or they, the writer has adopted a third person limited or intimate point of view.
I prefer intimate to limited because it seems to me that the boundaries set by this approach do not so much impose limitation as intensify the reader’s engagement with the specific character and their journey. It is as though an I is being disguised as a he, she, or they.
How might we compare Narrative POV on the screen to its articulation on the page? Can the screen do what the page can? Can it utilize this variety of approaches. Or does the audience simply sit back and watch events play out—somewhere in the third person objective/omniscient spectrum?
Most of us with a working knowledge of film are aware of the term POV Shot. The camera lens, placed where a character’s eyes are, offers the subjective view of that character. When they turn, the camera pans. When they look up or down, the camera tilts. When they rise or fall, the camera booms up or down. When they walk forward or move laterally, the camera dollies accordingly. For most of us, this amounts to the sum of our understanding of POV in film. It certainly used to for me.
But Narrative POV in film (as with fiction on the page) is a concept and practice, not a particular type of shot—although this device might well constitute an element of the onscreen modulation of POV.
Hitchcock, with his customary perspicacity, said:
Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema. I suppose Rear Window is the best example of it. Close-up of a man; what he sees; his reaction to it. And that can’t be done in any other medium—can’t be done in the theater, can’t be done in a novel. You put the audience in the mind of a particular character.
I think it can be done in a novel. At least, it can be described. What my fellow Londoner/Angeleno Hitchcock is pointing to though is the experiential nature of our engagement with with some characters in movies.
With the master’s method, the screen offers, through the experience of a character, a mimesis of our universal perception, questioning, and grasp of the world before us and what lies in it.
Here is what we might see on the screen:
1. A character changes from not noticing to noticing and looking at something.
2. Cut to the something they see.
3. Cut back to their change of expression as they react. (We must see this change. No good simply seeing a smile or grimace already in place. Then, if only for an instant, we’d have been severed from the journey of the character’s thoughts and emotions.)
4. A further moment as they question or reflect. (A look down, or to the side.)
5. A change of their expression as they take a decision. (A blink, a look up.)
6. (Possibly) They move, about to act…
7. Cut! Perhaps to a wider shot or to the next scene…
During this sequence, shots showing the something the character sees may be repeated one or more times, intercut with repeated shots of the character, the sizes of both tightening as the beholder’s interest grows.
The contrast of proximity to distance comes into play too. We might find ourselves closer to the character and further away from what they are looking at.
Here’s the paradox: we see not only what the character sees but we see the character seeing it—so how can we be in the character’s ‘point of view’?
We are. We are in their Narrative Point of View, and that NPOV is the screen’s equivalent of the page’s third person intimate. They are not an I (the single POV shot) but a he, she, or they. Even so, we experience a substantially subjective sense of their story of perception.
This third person intimate mode renders a character the viewer’s conduit into the story, and this character also prompts the means of it telling in terms of camera and editing… (On the page, meanwhile a character might prompt idiom, rhythm, sentence construction, tone.)
Such a character’s looks and actions might motivate angles, shot sizes, and cuts. They can also motivate camera placement. Say our fictional being points to something or calls out to someone, there might be a cut to their subjective view, yes, but there might equally be a cut to a shot in which the camera is placed opposite them so that we see them past the object of their attention—which is situated in mid- or foreground while they are placed in the background.
So instead of a POV shot, we see both beholder and what they behold in the same frame. We grasp their inner process and their understanding of their outer world. An example of third person intimate within a single frame.
The articulation of NPOV can also work in a simple scene of dialogue between two characters, whether static or mobile. Each might be shot on matching sizes and angles. When it comes to the edit though, one character will be given prominence over the other. They’ll be given more screentime, especially in relation to listening and reaction shots, plus tighter sizes and longer lenses with narrower focal planes—in contrast to the presentation of their interlocutor, with whom the viewer is not so connected.
There’s another factor. The character in whose NPOV we find ourselves may motivate both the sizes of shot used for the other person in the scene as well as the timing of the cuts from one character to the other.
In this way we experience the scene as our character experiences it. We are ‘with’ them in mind and heart. Their subjective perception is our perception. Our thoughts and emotions are taken from theirs.
In a scene where characters are mobile, one character might motivate not only shot size and cut (perhaps to keep them in the frame as they move) but camera movement too. A dolly, a counter-dolly, a boom up or down might take its energy and direction from those of the character in question (but not from those of other characters).
(At the end of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a protagonist’s gaze from a moving train even motivates a camera to dolly over vignettes that occur in his imagination—or if they’re ‘real’, they have to be happening in rooms far from anything he’s able to witness.)
With this technique, the looks, movements, and actions of other characters will not motivate anything apart from reaction shots of our central character that keep us in their perception of, and with their reactions to what is going on. This contrast serves to emphasize the filmmaker’s chosen Narrative Point of View.
Sound and score can be integral also. A sound of significance to a character in one way or another might be emphasized in the mix, a reflection of their subjective auditory perception. It might even prompt an image in their mind that we share on the interior ‘screen’ of ours.
A melody, musical motif, a sting, notes from a particular instrument meanwhile, might serve to draw us into a character’s experience, might bring us into the memory of some moment when we last heard it.
While I’m on the seminal topic of soundscape, a voice-over can take us directly into the mind of a character, their emotions, denials, disturbances, world view, secret thoughts. It may contradict what we see of them, what we’ve understood of them, or may reveal how they imagine themselves to be.
How does it feel though when, after rigorously following the NPOV of a character for any length of time, we find a sudden switch to those of others? How might this come across if the director has deliberately designed the shift?
I’m indebted to Martin Scorsese and a conversation I was lucky enough to have with him when I was putting together a class on Narrative POV in film. The great director suggested I watch Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man…
Early in the movie, protagonist Manny Balestrero visits an insurance office to make a claim on a policy. The point of view moves to the teller when she begins to think she recognizes Manny as the robber who recently held up the office at gunpoint.
As the POV spreads from her to one colleague after another—none of whom we yet know—we ourselves experience the contagious paranoia in an unsettling manner that seeds our own misgivings that Hitchcock’s unsuspecting protagonist could indeed have been the culprit. (Even if the title of the movie is The Wrong Man!)
These are no rules however. Although third person intimate is to me an intrinsically cinematic approach, great films can lack any subjective POV, be largely objective, or (rarely) may to the contrary be shot entirely on a POV shot or shots.
Narrative POV might be opportunistic, changing from moment to moment, perhaps to communicate suspense, or a gag in a comedy.
Hyper POV is a term I use to describe a violent event, for example in an action movie, covered from many angles, each offering the most dynamic impact, second by second, frame by frame. Third person objective barely measures up to such visceral presentation of mayhem.
The complications of dramatic irony, of unreliable narrators might also be brought to bear. We shouldn’t forget, meanwhile, that we may feel closer to a character and want to go along with them simply because we like them! Or identify with them. Or wish we could be them. Or the star playing them has a compelling charisma. Or a performance draws us in.
Let’s end with a look at that screenshot from the top of this article:
The moment occurs in Kieślowski’s Three Colors Blue, in the seconds before Juliette Binoche’s Julie—in whose eye we see the reflection of a physician—asks him about the condition of her daughter after the family’s car crash. No moment could be more dramatic; the only character we’ve seem thus far is the child…
As Julie asks that question, and receives its answer, the film gives us our first view of her—and it’s in a close-up.
Here, the narrative point of view of the character is introduced in the very same moments as the character herself—a devastating display of the director’s mastery of this powerful concept.
Peter Markham