Sunday, April 11, 2010

what position my position is in

Like most of Brent's films there is a narrator in Gravity. It's hard to say what position the narrator is in. Omniscient? First person? Third? I don't know. He watches, comments, questions, relates the actions & sometimes even the dialogue that is going on within the film and within the world at large. I know there's this thing called free indirect discourse which is sort of where a lot of Brent's narrators lie I think, a third person who talks for/as the characters at some points but is also watching & interpreting along with the reader/watcher. The camera takes on a lot of the actions of the narrator voice too. 

It moves like a character watching from all kinds of angles, looking in on what is happening which gets even more layered when thinking about Leonard's devotion to God, the way Leonard begged God to come down and intervene in his personal sadness. I wanted to bring out the narrator prescence even more so I decided to give him his own foley noise - a gentle glass tinged swoosh as he hovers around the screen. 
I remember when Brent started adding the narrator to the film and a friend of ours said "You know narration is stigmatized in film." I don't know if that's true or not but I do know that if it wasn't for The Stranger in The Big Lebowski I would never have known early on that The Dude was high in the running for laziest worldwide...narrator or no narrator, everyone tells a story in a different way I guess!