What a wealth of comparative insights Don has given us! And I thank him in particular for not pointing out that in my previous sending I misnamed the female lead character in Goodfellas. IÕll have to go look up the Chatman text, and IÕm sure itÕll clarify much on the general topic. But, prior to that enlightenment, I have two thoughts about the significance of POV shots relative to what can be taken for narrative structure in cinema more or less akin to first-person narrative in literature. (1) The POV is a narrative construction and not a technical/grammatical device. That an audience accepts this identification of image with viewpoint is fully a function of not just general cinematic convention but more importantly the specific cinematic context, i.e., the sequence of images and sounds before, during and after the POV. (2) That a cinematic narrative may concentrate upon a single protagonistÕs experience, feelings, knowledge, point of view, etc., is typically composed of much more than POV shots, which do indeed tend to be rather obtrusive. And thus instances that by technical description are very similar nevertheless diverge widely in meaning. Witness the difference between the eery disembodiment of the intruding subject into the subjective view of Vampyr vs. the dream-transformational drift of the Bamboo-Lounge sequence shot in Goodfellas. Similarly, Hitchcock can get away with the obtrusiveness of the POV in both Rear Window and NNW in part by virtue of the context that uses the POV to establish the pairing within the same frame of the voyeur side-by-side with the reflected image of the object of the voyeurÕs voyeurism. I think RingoÕs momentary POV in Stagecoach is incidental to what else is going on in the sequence of last five shots in that scene. Relative motion directly toward and away from the camera figures in each of these shots. This motion signifies danger, death and violence. Each shot of the five offers a different variation of that movement. If we recollect RingoÕs first appearance in the film -- a lurching, fast tracking shot into a close-up of Ringo, showing the fear and apprehension of the young man just escaped from prison -- we can add fear and apprehension to the list of connotations of this motion. DallasÕ rush to clutch the fence post recaptiulates, by contrast, the stasis of rail-fence at the Stagecoach station, where Ringo had proposed marriage, shyly and indirectly, but honestly and romantically: Ō... a half-built cabin, where a man could live, with a woman ....Ķ In the final scene, her fear that the unbelievable redemption that has entered her life -- a promise of love and happiness, may have just evaporated in the gunfight she has just heard -- is reflected in that motion of her toward the camera, to halt, clutching desparately at the stationary fence-post. In the same emotive and cognitive thrust, RingoÕs ambulatory POV echoes this same fear for the audience by recapitulating in inverted form the motion of the immediately previous shot: is perhaps Ringo, like Luke, mortally wounded, and about to fall dead? But when Ringo enters this shot, the camera halts, and so this moment brings to a close the motion of the headlong dash of a stagecoach full of misfits into a dangerous wilderness and futures frought with horrifying uncertainties. When Curly and Doc then shoo off the buggy carrying Ringo and Dallas to their new life, it is a lateral movement that the buggy takes, out of the frame to the right. Though Ringo and Dallas rush headlong back into the wilderness, the intimations of danger are gone. FordÕs use of the POV here serves four or five rather clear narrative and formal purposes simultaneously. It is an incidental though vital element amongst others in the context of the impeding narrative purposes of this rathe r complex scene. Dennis Rothermel California State University, Chico ______________________________________________________________________________ _ To: [log in to unmask] From: Film and TV Studies Discussion List on Tue, Jul 8, 1997 12:19 PM Subject: Re: Adaptations/first-person narratives Another thought about Dennis's comments on GOODFELLAS: "The long sequenced shot introducing the litany of Henry=D5s friends all collected in the Bamboo Lounge plays upon the coordination of Henry=D5s voice-over introduction of each character with the diegetic conversation, as they each address Henry by speaking to the camera head-on. At the end of the shot, Henry steps into view and the camera then follows him -- and in that moment we see how interchangeable are the literal transpositions of first- and third-person narrative structures from literature to cinema. The remarkable smoothness of that sequence shot, however, barely disguises its physical impossibility as the diegetic subjective view of Henry Hill. The camera fleetingly stoops to knee-level, tilts up slightly, and zooms in, to get a better view of a man sitting at a table. Just as quickly it drifts up above and over the bar, panning back around to view the patrons at the bar. One by one they speak to =D2Henry,=D3 who ostensibly saunters down the length of the bar from the bartender=D5s side. The convenient arrangement of the all of Henry=D5s old friends who each speak to him, as he (in voice-over) speaks to us about them, along with the dreamy, irreal flow of the sequence shot mark this scene as a *synthetic* remembrance -- i.e., not a scene from Henry=D5s life, but how he remembers all his old friends." It's interesting how often this technique--of an apparently subjective shot that includes the person who is apparently looking at the scene--shows up. It is exploited in a very obvious way by Dreyer in VAMPYR but Scorsese actually seems to pushing the limits of a fairly common Hollywood technique. For example, in CROSSFIRE, the character of "Mitch" falls down in a subjective flashback but as he gets back to his feet, he stands up into the camera's view. Even in STAGECOACH, which has very few subjective shots, after the shootout we see Dallas as the camera moves toward in a lurching gait, suggesting that it is Ringo who is walking toward her, but he too walks into the camera's view at the end. Yet these two examples have to be watched carefully to be noticed, unlike the strangeness of Dreyer's film or even Scorsese's. Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN) ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.