What if you were watching a haunted house movie – but you were the ghost? Or a racial drama in which you witnessed the horrors of Jim Crow America from a person of colour’s perspective – even if you are white? We can’t actually transcend our lived experience, but the idea of being transported into another person’s shoes has long been central to cinema. This is perhaps most strikingly on display in the very few films that use a first-person perspective – a technique that imbues the camera with a behind-the-eyes quality, allowing us to see what the embodied character is seeing.
Two films released last year deployed this technique with head-turning results: Steven Soderbergh’s horror movie Presence and RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated period drama Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2019 novel. In the former we assume the perspective of a ghost wandering around a house where a family of four live. In the latter, two young black men (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) are thrown into a state-run reform school in 1960s Florida. Presence unfolds entirely in the first-person, embracing an intentionally scratchy, rough-hewn look, while Nickel Boys’ more polished approach deploys first-person as part of a suite of aesthetic embellishments.
These films are notable partly because first-person cinema is so rare. While this perspective is extensively deployed in literature and video games, it has never really caught on in movies.
One of the most famous examples is the pulpy 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, which follows a wisecracking gumshoe, Robert Montgomery’s Phillip Marlowe, embroiled in a pot-boiling plot involving scheming women and crooked cops. It almost entirely unfolds in first-person, though every now and then Marlowe appears and speaks directly to the audience, in moments that feel strange, like out-of-body experiences.
Franck Khalfoun’s 2012 remake of the cult serial killer movie Maniac, is nearly entirely shot in the first-person, adding an extra layer of wince-inducing voyeurism. A rare example of a film that unfolds entirely in first-person is the frenetic 2016 action flick Hardcore Henry – shot in the (somewhat unfulfilling) manner of a video game that can not be played.
Many other productions dabble in first-person to add visual and atmospheric pop, including famous shots in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window. First-person has also been used as an immersive way to introduce protagonists, deployed in the opening acts of Gaspar Noé’s Tokyo-set 2009 headtrip Enter the Void, Julian Schnabel’s heart-rending 2007 biopic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and 1931’s spectacularly loud and unhinged Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – one of the oldest examples of the technique.
Almost always, first-person in cinema is flavoured with the tang of experimentation; a feeling the film-maker is entering uncharted or at least seldom explored territory. It has a way of upending entrenched rules of motion picture storytelling, entering an exciting space that challenges accepted wisdom. Usually when actors address the camera, for instance, they draw attention to the film-making process and illusion is shattered – thus the term “breaking the fourth wall”. But first-person tends to have the opposite effect, further pulling us in, closing the gap between our world and the narrative one.
Examples of this are strewn throughout the aesthetically daring Nickel Boys: when its characters look into the camera, it really does feel as if they’re looking into us. But Lady in the Lake is a classic example of how this approach can go pear-shaped: the actors really, really stare into the lens, as if they’re trying to destroy it with their eyes, delivering waffling monologues and painfully melodramatic performances. By making his protagonist a ghost, Soderbergh side-steps this issue in Presence: the other characters can’t see the apparition, so they don’t speak to it.
Extensive use of first-person also tends to involve a different relationship with narrative time, pushing the medium closer to the rhythms of ordinary life. Whereas films have generally become faster and more fastidiously edited, first-person slows things down. Which makes sense: our point-of-view doesn’t have cuts, unless you count blinking or sleeping – so why should films that attempt to emulate it? Presence and Nickel Boys – two rare examples of notable, well-reviewed releases that prominently deploy the first person – are engaging and cleverly crafted experiences. But the door remains open for a truly great first-person film.
Nickel Boys is available to stream on Prime Video in Australia, UK and US from 27 February. Presence is out in cinemas in Australia, UK and US now
