Submitted by Greg on Thu, 01/24/2008 - 15:05.
Alisha brought up a good point in Chatman's discourse regarding voice-over, and I would like to continue the discussion a tad.
As Zach pointed out, Chatman writes: "Too much overt verbal description suggests a lack of faith in the medium." Too much verbal description can suggest a lack of faith in the audience as well. If a character explains a scene through voice-over, and simply highlights what the audience already sees, it implies that the audience is dumb. A good example of this would be the film "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Much of the voice-over work in this film adds nothing to the narrative--it only explains what we already know. read more »
