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Focus Index
A Defenseand Historyof Voice-Over Narration
By Sarah Kozlof
In Spike Jonzes 2002 film Adaptation, the principal character,
Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage), goes to a lecture on
screenwriting given by popular authority and real-life figure
Robert McKee, here impersonated by the actor Brian Cox. McKee
delivers the standard diatribe against voice-over narration:
"And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends.
God help you. Thats flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a
voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character."
In the movie, no one has the guts to debate this sweeping
denunciationMcKee is portrayed as a bully who brooks no
questioning of his prescriptionsand yet the movie as a whole,
which relies heavily on giving the viewer access to Charlies
thoughts, works as a slantwise rebuttal.
So it has been throughout the history of filmmaking. Many have
issued pronouncements against voice-over, and few have
murmured in its defense. Yet voice-over narration remains an
integral part of moviemakingso common that we often overlook
its contribution and ignore its development.
Before we begin tracing its history, however, lets define our
terms. Films use various kinds of narrating devices (such as
captions) and numerous varieties of off-screen speech (such as
delusional aural flashbacks or interior monologue). In voice-over
narration proper, viewers hear someone recount a series of
events from a time and space different from that simultaneously
pictured on the screen. [pictured right: The Magnificent
Ambersons, Orson Welles, 1942] These narrators can assume two
divergent stances in relation to the cinematic storyeither as a
third-person voice outside the fictional world of the events or in
the first person, as a character/participant in the story world. The
scope of these narrators involvement can also vary: some speak
only at the very beginning of the movie, providing a frame; some

pull up a chair in the middle and proceed to recount an

embedded flashback or illustrative tale; some narrate
continuously.
In a sense, film started with third-person voice-over narration.
Nineteenth-century magic-lantern shows had been presented by
lecturers. During the mediums very beginnings in the late 1890s,
when movies consisted of just one unbroken take and programs
were structured by stringing several of these together, exhibitors
also employed lecturers to provide running commentaries to
the audience. At the turn of the century, as films grew longer and
more complex, the need for lecturers grew rather than declined.
Lecturers were a standard component of novelty traveling
exhibitions such as the popular Hales Tours, which started in
1905. They reached their peak of popularity in the United States
in the early 1910s, but they were soon made obsolete by
intertitleswhich also serve to narrateas production companies
strove to standardize exhibition practices.
When sound came to the American cinema in the late 1920s,
broadcast radio provided the immediate model for vocal
narration. The first significant use of the soundtrack for voiceover narration was in newsreels: in January 1930, Universal hired
Graham McNamee, a prominent radio announcer and
sportscaster, and took out a full-page ad in Variety addressed to
exhibitors: Now you can present the worlds most famous radio
broadcaster as the Talking Reporter in Universal Newsreel.
Universals lead was soon followed by other newsreel companies,
most influentially by The March of Time, which started on radio in
1931, migrated to film in 1935, and covered world events in its
inimitable style until 1951. Its narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis
[pictured left], became the archetypal, third-person voice of
God.
The earliest extensive use of voice-over narration in American
fiction film was in 1933s The Power and the Glory (written by
Preston Sturges), in which a character named Henry, upon
returning from the funeral of his best friend, Tom Garner (Spencer
Tracy), sets the action going by telling his wife the story of
Garners life, recounted over a series of achronological
flashbacks. Henry narrates extensively, bridging ellipses,
commenting on events, even speaking the characters dialogue

for them. Critics and audiences at the time heralded the films
originality. And in her article Raising Kane (1971), Pauline Kael
argued that The Power and the Glory was one of the models for
Citizen Kane (1941).
Kane includes a wonderful parody of The March of Time (Then,
last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster
Kane), but in fact this film uses less voice-over than
contemporary studio films. Following the lead of such creative
radio dramatists as Norman Corwin, Arch Oboler, Archibald
MacLeish, and Welles himself, studios in the late 1930s began
making voice-over narration an integral part of their storytelling.
Adaptations of Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939), Rebecca
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford,
1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), Jane
Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944), and others used narration to
replicate the novels narrative structures.
In the 1940s, womens films and films noir used voice-over to
express their protagonists subjectivity, both genres being
concerned with the effect of the past on the present and their
characters gradual attainment of knowledge. In that same
decade, war films adopted voice-over narration as a means of
conveying both exposition and masculine authority. Postwar,
narration was particularly welcomed in a cycle of modest semidocumentariessuch as Jules Dassins The Naked City (1948)
and, conversely, in the expensive, grandiose epics like El Cid
(Anthony Mann, 1961) that tried to lure viewers away from their
television screens with their ambitious wanderings over history
and geography.
European directors, such as Fritz Lang in Germany, Luis Buuel in
Spain, and Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, and Max Ophls in France,
had employed voice-over skillfully in the decades after the
coming of sound. But the New Wave movements, with their
emphasis on Brechtian techniques and self-consciousness,
explored its potential even more eagerly. Voices lead us through
Marienbad, through crises of faith, through failed romances,
through bourgeois self-disgust, through ironic critiques of social
practices. The narration highlights characters confusion and
unreliability and allows directors overtly to address their viewers
sitting in the dark. Robert Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest,

1951; A Man Escaped, 1956), Chris Marker (La Jete, 1962; Sans
Soleil, 1983), Franois Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1962; Two English
Girls, 1971), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959; Last
Year at Marienbad, 1961), Jean-Luc Godard (Band of Outsiders,
1964, pictured left; Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967),
Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers, 1972), Toms Gutirrez
Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), Jir Menzel (Closely
Watched Trains, 1966), and others used voice-over extensively,
and the embrace of these auteurs elevated the techniques
respectability.
So, when the New Waves washed up on American shores, voiceoveralong with jump cuts and temporal fluidityimmediately
became in vogue with the most respected cult directors. Stanley
Kubrick relied heavily on voice-over in Lolita (1962), Dr.
Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Barry
Lyndon (1975); Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver (1976) and
GoodFellas (1990); Arthur Penn in Little Big Man (1970); Terrence
Malick in his classics Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978),
and The Thin Red Line (1998); and Woody Allen in films too
numerous to list.
And voice-over remains as firmly entrenched today as ever. In the
last few decades, independent filmmakers and studio productions
alike have used voice-over narration to convey a personal tone
and a postmodern sensibility, notably in Clueless (1995),
American Beauty (1999), Fight Club (1999; pictured right), and
Amelie (2001).
So why are we still debating the legitimacy of voice-over? Like
the technique itself, the criticisms against voice-over narration go
back as far as the medium, stemming from fiercely held beliefs
about cinemas unique characteristicsits specificityand its
relationship with its audience.
From the beginning, film aficionados have felt the need to defend
cinema as an art and to do so by setting it apart from other
media, especially theater and literature. What makes film distinct
and special, these theorists argue, is its capacity to convey
information nonverballythrough mise-en-scne, editing, camera
movement, POV, facial expression or pantomime. As is well
known, many intellectuals and filmmakers, including Rudolf

Arnheim, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Ren Clair,

argued against the use of synchronous sound when it emerged in
the 1920s, seeing in speech the death of film art. Even today,
reference books and textbooks repeat ad infinitum that because
film is a visual art, speech should never have a leading role;
dialogue must always be minimizedkept in its place.
Nol Carroll, for one, has challenged the basic assumptions
behind the specificity argument in Philosophical Problems of
Classical Film Theory. Although artistic media obviously rely upon
distinct sign systems, this should not restrict their reach. Along
with spoken dialogue, theater may fruitfully employ lighting, set
design, printed signs, just as novels may utilize graphic layout
(think James Joyces Ulysses) or illustration (Dickens worked
closely with his illustrators). Many of us value the cinemas range
its ability to incorporate so many aspects of other art forms.
The cinema is enriched, not watered down or polluted by, the
artistic techniques it shares with other muses.
A fallback charge against voice-over narration is that using it is
insulting to the audience. Voice-over narration is suspect because
it is a means of telling rather than showing. Telling is
judged as a mark of laziness and/or condescension. Both of these
subtexts are apparent in this quote from Robert McKees popular
screenwriting manual, Story (italics his):
[T]he trend toward using telling narration throughout a film
threatens the future of our art. More and more films by some of
the finest directors from Hollywood and Europe indulge in this
indolent practice. They saturate the screen with lush photography
and lavish production values, then tie images together with a
voice droning on the soundtrack, turning the cinema into what
was once known as Classic Comic Books. . . Thats fine for
children, but its not cinema. The art of cinema connects Image A
via editing, camera or lens movement with Image B, and the
effect is meanings C, D, and E expressed without explanation. . . .
It takes little talent and less effort to fill a soundtrack with
explanation. Show, dont tell is a call for artistry and discipline,
a warning to us not to give in to laziness but to set creative
limitations that demand the fullest use of imagination and sweat.

The belief that incorporating narration is a cheap way of

pandering figures strongly in critical discussion of the 1992
directors cut of Blade Runner (1982; pictured left), which
famously eliminated the voice-over added by the studio for
narrative clarity over Ridley Scotts objections when the film was
originally released. Greg Solman, writing in Film Comment, was
one of the few reviewers who defended the original voice-over as
useful, indeed essential, claiming that we can only understand
the new version because of the information we remember from
the studio version.
The supposed contrast between showing and telling has a
political dimension. 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.
Contemporary documentary theorists such as Jeffrey Youdelman
and Bill Nichols, however, argue that in many circumstances
narration is a more forthright, honest approach to the subject
matter than pretending that the represented scenes speak for
themselves or that editing is noncoercive. In this line of
argument, they echo the thinking of literary theorist Wayne
Booth, who wrote in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Since
Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that
objective or impersonal or dramatic modes of narration are
naturally superior to any mode that allows for direct appearance
by the author or his reliable spokesman. Sometimes . . . the
complex issues involved in this shift have been reduced to a
convenient distinction between showing, which is artistic, and
telling, which is inartistic. Booth brilliantly demonstrated,
however, that reducing overt marks of narration or hiding the
authors hand are just variant rhetorical strategies: Showing is
just as manipulative as telling. Ernest Hemingway is guiding his
readers just as much as George Eliotonly more surreptitiously.
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. The David
McCullough-narrated sequences of Gary Ross Seabiscuit (2003)
set the horse race in context, explaining its significance to the
country as a whole. And filmmakers often use voice-over for
important character revelationsto give us direct access to a
characters thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. For instance,
in 2002s About a Boy [pictured right], Will (Hugh Grant), a selfabsorbed bachelor, unexpectedly finds himself involved with a
nerdy young boy, Marcus, and his manic-depressive mother. After
the grueling experience of taking Marcuss mother to the hospital
after her suicide attempt, Wills thoughtsin content and
metaphorreveal a great deal about his shallow selfishness:
The thing is, a persons life is like a TV show. I was the star of The
Will Show. And The Will Show wasnt an ensemble drama. Guests
came and went, but I was the regular. It came down to me and
me alone. If Marcuss mum couldnt manage her own show, if her
ratings were falling, it was sad, but that was her problem.
Ultimately, the whole single mum plotline was a bit complicated
for me.
Indeed, narration is such a powerful device for deepening
characterizations and leading viewers to share a characters
perspective that some film theorists see the voice as a
counterpoint to the gaze. Certainly, narration can be a tool for
granting those who historically have been objectified by the
camerae.g., women or minoritiesthe chance to speak for
themselves.
Voice-over narration can also add a level of poetry to a movie.
Michael Herrs phrasing in Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now
(1979; pictured below) is inherently poetic, and Martin Sheens
soft, bitter delivery makes lines such as, Everyone gets
everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they
gave me one, memorable and evocative.
Because voice-over narration automatically creates a doublelayering of commentary over visual track, it is unparalleled as a
mechanism for creating distance and irony. In films such as
Badlands (1973) and Raising Arizona (1987), filmmakers use the
characters benighted comments about their situations to point

up their blindness and limitations. Or a third person voice-over

can speak with ironic authority about a tribal blind spots, as in
The Age of Innocence (1993), when the narrator remarks: It was
widely known in New York, but never acknowledged, that
Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly
that they want to get to it. Voice-over has the potential to instill
a Brechtian self-reflexivity, as when Jean-Luc Godard offers a few
clues for late-comers to the movie theater in Band of Outsiders
(1964) or when Dede Truitt (Christine Ricci) in Don Roos The
Opposite of Sex (1998) dismissively talks back to the camera.
And, fundamentally, because voice-over refers to the most
traditional of storytelling formsthat of oral storytellingit
reaches out to the audience in a singular way, making the
filmgoing experience feel more natural, more intimate. Like
dear reader references in a novel, or dramatic actors making
eye contact with a theater audience, using voice-over narration
implies an implicit recognition of the spectator; the device flatters
us with its confiding tones or challenges us with its direct appeal.
In Adaptation, the fictional Charlie Kaufman is cowed by Robert
McKees diatribe, and from that point on in the film, the voice is
silent. Fortunately, however, throughout the history of film reallife screenwriters and directors have blithely ignored the many
dire, limiting strictures against voice-over narration, and
proceeded to make the most of these invisible storytellers.

Sarah Kozloff is the Chair of Film at Vassar College and the author
of Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction
Film and Overhearing Film Dialogue.