This is a narrative device allowing the audience to hear the voice of a narrator or character who is not visually in the frame, or who is visually in the frame but does not say the words that are heard on the soundtrack, it being understood that they are voicing a thought.
Luis Buñuel allows characters to speak without moving their lips, that is, we hear what they are thinking in voiceover in The Golden Age (L'Age d'Or, 1930), with the script by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Six years later, Sacha Guitry wrote and directed a film narrated in voiceover, almost without dialogue, Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d'un tricheur, 1936).
The function of auditory counterpoint or images with voice-over can contribute to intellectualising the narrative discourse or to conferring a determined poetic dimension
Voiceover is a common device in reports and documentaries, such as the medium-length film Night Mail (1936) by Harry Watt and Basil Wright. The function of the voiceover as an auditory counterpoint to the images can help to intellectualise the narrative or confer a certain poetic dimension, such as in Hiroshima, My Love (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959), in which two lovers, whose intertwined bodies we can barely see, talk about love and the effects of the atomic bomb while documentary images of Hiroshima are shown.
Hiroshima, my love (Hiroshima mon amour)
Hiroshima, My Love / Hiroshima mon amour | Alain Resnais, 1959, France
August 1957, Hiroshima. After finishing the shooting of a film about peace, a young French actress (whose name we never find out) spends her last night in the city of Hiroshima hidden in a hotel with her occasional lover, a Japanese man who she had just met and with whom she would have a very brief love affair. What could just be a brief fling becomes, in the shadow of a city scorched by the memory of nuclear horror, an intense love affair that leads her to relive the painful story of her first love with a German soldier in occupied France.
I said it was a realistic film because that is how it happens in our heads; that was the idea
Alain Resnais
(1922-2014)
A French director, screenwriter and editor, Resnais would, along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, be one of the main representatives of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). While he does not fully belong to that movement, he would be considered one of its most recognisable pillars. Fascinated by cinema since childhood, Resnais began his career as a film-maker spending all of his time on documentary films, a genre to which he would make an exceptional contribution, filming a handful of real masterpieces amongst which the following short films stand out in their own right: the Oscar-winning Van Gogh (1948) Statues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi, 1953), Night and fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955) and All the World’s Memories (Toute la mémoire du monde) (1956). After working as an editor under the orders of directors of the stature of Agnès Varda, Truffaut and William Klein, Resnais decided to make the leap to feature films in 1959 with Hiroshima, My Love (Hiroshima, mon amour), a film written by Marguerite Duras which the American critic Leonard Maltin did not hesitate to refer to as “the Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave”. Two years later came the equally masterful Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), written this time with the forefather of Nouveau Roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, a mysterious, labyrinthine and provocative film for which he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In 1963 he returned to more political cinema with Muriel, where among other topics he addressed the thorny issue of torture in Algeria, and in 1966 with The War is Over (La guerre est finie), written by Jorge Semprún. In 1967 he participated in the collective film Far From Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam), in solidarity with the Vietnamese people. A tireless worker, his prestige would continue increasing over the following decades with films as important as I Love You, I Love You (Je t'aime, je t'aime, 1968), Staviski (1973), Providence (1976), My American Uncle (Mon oncle d'Amérique, 1980), Life Is a Bed of Roses (La vie est un roman, 1983), Love Unto Death (L'amour à mort, 1984), Mélo (1986), Smoking/No Smoking (1993), and his great success in terms of critical and public acclaim, the charming Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson, 1997). His last film, Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter, 2014), was presented at the Berlin film festival just one month before his death. He was 91.
