Do you feel like the camera or the narrative? The uses of POV shots in The Lady in the Lake and Black Mirror The point of view shots have been used as a great component in both The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) and Black Mirror’s Christmas Special (Otto Bathurst, 2014). Although both films share the same purpose of applying the point of shot, to endow the audience with certain narrative’s perspective in order to arouse pathos on the character(s) or the scene(s), yet the same cinematic technique is used quiet divergently due to the changes of the cinematic editing and the interpretation of the human vision. By close textural analyzing of specific scenes in two films, as well as the article from Jonathan Crary, I will argue that
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Although there are the scenes where the privet detective faces the camera and introduces himself or the progress of solving the crime, as the audience is detaching from sharing the same view point of the narrator and taking the same side of the camera, there is never a shot in the film which presents the narrator with his full body image. The recognition of either ourselves or other people’s identity begins with viewing every single parts of the body, from the head to the toes; other than that, any human figure is just a piece of the full image. The film invites the audience to experience the process of solving the crime and to “see” the people and places that are related with the crime through the detective’s “eyes”. However, a real human being does not only see oneself from one’s own eyes, but more importantly, from other people and the surroundings in the environment. With the strangeness of the details on the detective’s outlooks at the first place, the audience might find it hard to recognize “themselves” when the detective is looking at a mirror. Although in Lack, there are plenty of panning and tilting for the audience to see what kind of the environments they are in and to realize the relative composition to another character(s), the disadvantage of primarily using the point of view shots is that it does not provide the audience a chance to see “themselves” (the detective) actually in the setting
Although there are the scenes where the privet detective faces the camera and introduces himself or the progress of solving the crime, as the audience is detaching from sharing the same view point of the narrator and taking the same side of the camera, there is never a shot in the film which presents the narrator with his full body image. The recognition of either ourselves or other people’s identity begins with viewing every single parts of the body, from the head to the toes; other than that, any human figure is just a piece of the full image. The film invites the audience to experience the process of solving the crime and to “see” the people and places that are related with the crime through the detective’s “eyes”. However, a real human being does not only see oneself from one’s own eyes, but more importantly, from other people and the surroundings in the environment. With the strangeness of the details on the detective’s outlooks at the first place, the audience might find it hard to recognize “themselves” when the detective is looking at a mirror. Although in Lack, there are plenty of panning and tilting for the audience to see what kind of the environments they are in and to realize the relative composition to another character(s), the disadvantage of primarily using the point of view shots is that it does not provide the audience a chance to see “themselves” (the detective) actually in the setting