Since we are witnessing what a particular person sees in a POV shot, it is an easy step to represent how that person sees an object, for instance, by throwing the object out-of-focus to suggest drunkeness. This is the perception shot. ny number of formal devices besides focus can function in a perception structure.
One is color.
In Summer Holiday (1948) a boy’s drunkenness is tied to gradual changes in the color of the scene as well as changes in costume and setting.
In biger than life (1956) the image assumes a pronounced red hue to represent a psychotic rage induced by an overdose of the drug cortisone and in I am Two (1962) we supposedly see what a newborn infant sees – abstract colours and patterns moving mysteriously.
Marnie (1964) > use of red to represent a repressed memory
Sound, too, can function exactly as color in subjective structures. Thus we could distinguish an aural POV – where we hear from the character’s point in space – and an aural perception – where we hear something only the character hears.
In Vampire People (De Leon, 1966) or example, color filters are used non-diegtically in many scenes to accentuate such qualities as violence, the presence of vampires, and the exercise of supernatural power. Ocassionally the film will flirt with a subjective interpretation: when a vampire’s eyes open, alles goes to red but when the eyes close, the scenes becomes blue.
We can say that the origin of the color continues to be metaphoricaly attributed to character although the literal representation of space is now impersonal. A series of neural spaces has been embedded within a subjective structure, but is to be understood as a further expansion of character. This is is the subjectivity called character projection.
A spectator sees what the camera sees but also, more importantly, sees what he or she knows and expects (and desires). Thus we may very well see space from a neutral angle while simultaneously holding an aspect of that space – say, color- apart from the image and attributing it to a character. A camera ‘angle’, aflter all, is only a single property of that complex phenomenon we call ‘space’ and there is no reason we need to be bound by it.
The so-called illusion of three-dimensional space created by the classical film is complete not when the camera has shown all four walls of a room -which, any way, is usually prohibited by the 180-degree rule – but when the viewer is able to imagine him or herself in various places apart from the camera. What is called ‘character’ is actually the potential site for a new set of spaces which may or may not already have been projected by the viewer. In this sense ‘character’ allows narrative space to be imagined from new positions. Thus characters are not simply objects which may be moved about inside space, like so many fireflies in a jar, but are in a deep way implicated in the very creation and perception of space by a viewer.
The syntagmatic functions of character in linking scenes and shots are well known – for instance, the match on action – but the paradigmatic functions – for instance, subjectivity – are seldom acknowledged. As a paradigmatic unit, the classical character has the capacity to generate for us the very spaces of which it is already composed. Subjectivty, then allows a certain reduplication of mis-en-scene and the already-seen.
Sound, too, may be a projection of character. Hitchcok’s blackmail. The heroine, unknown to others, has killed a man with a knife. At breakfast with her fable she only hears the word ‘knife’.
Sometimes we are fooled into believing that if only we had been more attentive (to the subsidiary devices), we would have discored the subjective nature of the shot – it’s ‘inevitable’ and true meaning. The classic text, as Barthes says, seeks to lie as little as possible and only enough to insure its own survival, the survival of its enigmas until the ‘end’. The viewer must be encouraged to guess and, when wrong, must be made to blame himself.
In summary, the subjective modiality ‘I hear’ bears a close relation to the subjective ‘I see’. The act of speaking or writing changes the relationship of character and viewer. When the character speaks, it is not as though we, too, are speaking. The viewer becomes a ‘you’ for the character’s ‘I’. Speech is already a discourse framed by the character so we are, at least, twice removed – the camera frames the character who frames his words. Our methodolocial assumption has been that any linguistic discourse is already embedded in a spatial – pictorial- discourse of the camera.
Moving in the other direction – to close the gap – one can imagine, first, character dialogue; then a character speaking only to himself; a character not speaking though we hear his ’thoughts’; and, finally, total absence of a character while we hear only his thoughts. Even in the latter case, however, the words themselves are an irreducible discourse for which there must be some (perhaps effaced) narrator or level of narration standing between viewer and character.
The most we can say is that dialogue is a second-order subjectivity. It may be converted into a primary subjectivity by expanding ‘I say’ into spatial and auditory equivalents – ‘I see’ and ‘I hear’ – for example, an optical and auditory POV.
The classical transformation assumes that there is no necessary loss in moving from objective to subjective. The character is fully able to recapture the sense of - and become master of – its space. In short, the clasical film represents space as if telescoped within its characters.
