Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film

by Sarah Kozloff

"Let me tell you a story," each film seems to offer silently as its opening frames hit the screen. But sometimes the film finds a voice―an off-screen narrator―for all or part of the story. From Wuthering Heights and Double Indemnity to Annie Hall and Platoon , voice-over narration has been an integral part of American movies.

Through examples from films such as How Green Was My Valley , All About Eve , The Naked City , and Barry Lyndon , Sarah Kozloff examines and analyzes voice-over narration. She refutes the assumptions that words should only play a minimal role in film, that "showing" is superior to "telling," or that the technique is inescapably authoritarian (the "voice of god"). She questions the common conception that voice-over is a literary technique by tracing its origins in the silent era and by highlighting the influence of radio, documentaries, and television. She explores how first-person or third-person narration really affects a film, in terms of genre conventions, viewer identification, time and nostalgia, subjectivity, and reliability. In conclusion she argues that voice-over increases film's potential for intimacy and sophisticated irony.

167 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sarah has spent her life immersed in literature, narrative, and film.

After a degree in English at Dartmouth she worked in film production in NYC. She earned a Ph.D. from an interdisciplinary program at Stanford University, joining the Film Department of Vassar College in 1988. In 2009 she was awarded the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowed Chair.

In 2012, while teaching a senior seminar on American Women Directors, she realized that neither the books nor films of Lord of the Rings could pass the Bechdel Test. That summer, she grabbed her laptop and started imagining a world that awaited the return of the queen.

She didn’t know then that this leap into creative writing would spark a new career. Her epic fantasy quartet, The Nine Realms, was published by TOR on a rapid publications schedule. All four books, A Queen in Hiding, The Queen of Raiders, A Broken Queen, and The Cerulean Queen, came out from January through April 2020.

She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and a shifting menagerie of pets, who mistakenly believe they are suitable replacements for grown sons.