Voiceover

The (often narrational) vocal audio track one sometimes hears layered “over” the image track of a film. This voice can be omniscient, fallible, bodiless, or transiently embodied. It can represent the psychic musings of a character (as in Adaptation (2002)), or perform the function of an extra-diegetic storyteller (Maleficent (2014)). A voiceover can also be ambiguous, troubling the boundary between the world of the film and the world without. Importantly, the vocal track of a voiceover does not actually hover “over” film’s image track. It is printed on celluloid, alongside the visual track.

UCLA Logo
UCLA ARTS Logo
UC Humanities Network Logo
UC Humanities Research Institute
UCLA Center for Digital Humanities