The Temporality of the Narrating Voice
The voice-over’s production of pastness is normally threefold: The conventional
experience of a voice-over aspost production, as something added onto the film
afterwards, telling about or commenting upon the actions from its position on
the balcony, to paraphrase Michel Chion’s expression,involves an experience
of temporal distance between the actions unfolding and the action verbally de-
scribed.
Moreover, besides the experience of a voice-over as post-produced sound,
voice-overs are often also considered narrating instances employing a narrative
mode in which the characters in the narrative universe are referred to, be it“he”
or“she”(third-person narrator),“I”(first-person narrator), and the less com-
mon“you”(second-person narrator). The voice-overs in most of the slide-mo-
tion films mentioned here are first-person narrators. A first-person narrator
talking about him- or herself as a character in the story is often also termed an
autodiegetic narrator. Confronted with a story of dramatic realism, an autodie-
getic voice-over narrator is often experienced as comforting for an empathetic
audience, because the narrator’s ability to actually tell the story seems to ensure
the character’s survival. The story is, in other words, experiencedretrospec-
tively.
This impression of retrospective narration is often strengthened by the voice-
over speaking in thepast tense: They talk about the eventsassomething that
have already happened in the past. This is the third dimension of the voice-
over’s production of pastness and an aspect of some of the slide-motion films
discussed here.
The production of pastness in the slide-motion film varies according to the
three dimensions of the voice-over mentioned above and to the discursive
mode in which the filmic story is told. Let me elaborate on this by comparing
Año UñatoPhoto-Romans,One Day, andSolvorn.
The Narrative Past ofP-R
Photo-Romansis a French series of thirteen short films produced circain
cooperation with television networks in twelve European countries. They are all
classic, urban short stories, with one or two main characters and a beginning,
middle, and end.
The filmic expression of the seriesPhoto-Romansis quite similar toAño
UñaandLa Jetée: Visually, these short films present a series of photographi-
96 Liv Hausken