Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film by Sarah Kozloff
University of California Press, 1992
We could have had a narrator telling you what to think, that's the easy way... But it's not the adult wasy... We want to make the audience think and draw their own conclusion.
Stanley Karnow, chief correspondent for "Vietnam: A television History"
In a movie you don't tell people thing, you show people things.
Willaim Goldman, Advenures in the Screen Trade
According to this doctrine, when information is told to us by a narrator, it automatically becomes tainted with subjectivity - Even ideological biases; only showing events without commentary allows spectators to have direct communion with the images and interpret their meaning and significance for themselves.
-The quotes are directly against the use of voice over as they view it as a violation against the meaning of storytelling through visuals. The source itself goes on to agree saying that anything with a narrator is "Tainted with subjectivity" I believe that they are putting to much faith in the hands of the viewer. Granted that there are people who could follow the most complicated of storylines without the use of need of a narrator, even if they have to watch it twice, look at Inception for example. On the other hand there are those who watch films for the entertainment factor not the intelligence, so does that mean that we as filmmakers should cast them out as to idiotic to view our creation? Narration is used so commonly that you don't even realise it, the fact that it doesn't bother the intellectual viewer (As we see it as another codex form to help unravel the films plot twists and enigmas before everyone else) is reason enough to allow it to guide the others.
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