The Point of View of the Wandering Camera

Author(s): Kenneth Johnson

Source: Cinema Journal , Winter, 1993, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), pp. 49-56
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225604

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The Point of View of the Wandering Camera
by Kenneth Johnson

I would like to call narratological attention to a particular camera movement

that occurs in some films. It is what Seymour Chatman calls in Antonioni films
the "wandering camera,"' those moments when the camera as a narrating entity
wanders on its own, detached from supporting the story through a character's
point of view. David Bordwell calls attention to this camera movement in F W.
Murnau's Sunrise (1927), when as the Husband crosses the marsh to his illicit
meeting with the City Woman, the camera "does not follow his footsteps but
strikes out on its own."2 This camera movement calls attention to itself as an
"independent presence," independent of its conventional function in cinematic
discourse.
Remember the trespassing camera that opens Citizen Kane? The voyeuristic
camera in the opening sequence of Psycho? Perhaps you also experienced the
haunting camera movements in The Shining or the camera's "discrete" pan-
away at the moment when Mark Rutland rapes Marnie in the Hitchcock film.
Although these narrative instances are relatively brief and scarce, they do reveal
an interesting transition from one level of narration to another and, most
important, provide traces of enunciatory activity, or as Chatman calls it, narratorial
"slant,'"3 points of view from which we might assign or imply film authorship
when we use the names Hitchcock, Antonioni, Kubrick, or Welles. For when
we witness wandering camera, we witness cinematic narrative discourse at an
initial, enunciatory level that reveals traces of authorial activity.
Since wandering camera can be broadly characterized as a particular camera
shot, exclusive of editing, the realities of cinematic narration to which Andre
Gaudreault points might prove useful in partially explaining wandering camera's
nature. Gaudreault differentiates two agencies of film narrative: "monstration"
and "narration," the former being the product of the shot, and the latter that
of editing. The act of achieving a cinematic story through showing, or monstration,
produces an "illusion of the present" for the spectator, because "the monstrator's
'speech act' occurs during projection but the 'event described' occurs at an
earlier moment, during shooting."4 The viewing experience of a particular shot
is present tense, although the event was recorded in the past. That is why
Gaudreault calls the camera shot, from the perspective of spectation, a "simu-
lacrum of the present."
Monstration must be seen in relation to Gaudreault's other narratorial
agency, "narration," which is achieved through the editing of shots and "allows

Kenneth Johnson is an associate professor of English at Florida International University.

? 1993 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Cinema Journal 32, No. 2, Winter 1993 49

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for the inscription of a true narrative past": "Only the narrator can sweep us
along on its flying carpet through time. It is the intersection, the meeting, of
two viewpoints, the viewpoint of the narrator and the viewpoint of the narratee
which opens up the gap allowing for temporal 'difference.' ". The overall
experience of a conventional cinematic narrative, therefore, is the same as a
traditional scriptural narrative. A story is understood to be a "history"; events
and existents of the discourse are understood to exist in a story past. Since
monstration conventionally becomes subsumed into the larger past-tense orien-
tation of narration, its nature as an agent of the story becomes an effaced
omniscience. Wandering camera, because it foregrounds its presence, causes a
momentary conflict in tense experience. Wandering camera moves in discourse
time and space, but has no logical place in story time and space. What we
witness with wandering camera is a momentary shift in emphasis from the story
as something understood to be already complete, to the story in the process of
being created.
Wandering camera is not the only instance of enunciatory revelation or
highlighting. From Gaudreault's model, editing that departs from the conven-
tional cinematic discourse of effaced narration would also foreground the
enunciatory activity of the editing agent, so clearly evident in the unconventional
editing of a modernist film like Citizen Kane, in which the activity of both
narration and monstration become one of the film's major subject interests. Only
the camera as monstrator, however, can appear to exist in a logical contradiction
with the time and space of the story. Only the camera, operating as pure
monstrator can make its presence felt within the story world.
By foregrounding agency, wandering camera differentiates levels of narra-
tion, and with it "point of view," that theoretically problematic term defined by
Chatman as the "physical place or ideological situation or practical life-orientation
to which narrative events stand in relation."' In his early work Chatman
differentiates three life-orientations to be perceptual (objective and sensory),
conceptual (affective), and interest (ideological). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan calls
them perceptual, psychological, and ideological.' In Chatman's later work, point
of view is differentiated by discursive function: attitudes and perceptions can
be that of a narrator (slant), through the consciousness of a character (filter),
through a character's dominant presence in the story, but not necessarily through
his or her consciousness (center), or through the significance of a character to
the larger interests of the story (interest).8 Film achieves character filtration by
what Edward Branigan calls the subjectivity in cinematic narration, when the
apparatus (camera and editing) serves that level of narration, "where telling is
attributed to a character in the narrative and received by us as if we were in
the situation of a character.''9 I assume that Branigan means "situation" to refer
to all possible types of point of view.
In Terrence Malick's much discussed Badlands (1973), Holly, the voice-
over narrator, reveals an often differing slant from the point of view that she
filters as a character. Holly's voice-over narration provides a conceptual and

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interest slant, that of a naive and romantic adolescent, which is often revealed
to be "inappropriate," according to Sarah Kozloff, in light of Holly's rather
casual and undramatic responses to Kit's criminal activities. As Kozloff has
pointed out, without the differences in point of view provided by the various
levels of narration, the potential for recognizing the irony between what we are
told and what we are shown, in a movie such as Badlands, would not be
possible.'o
So, my specific interest in the wandering camera has to do with what it
reveals about its singular discursive nature and its effect on the story. Let me
begin with two examples from Antonioni's The Passenger (1975). The journalist
David Locke's frustrated attempt to contact the rebels in the African desert
culminates in the sequence where his jeep becomes mired in the sand. After a
typical Jack Nicholson temper tantrum scene, in which he impotently beats the
jeep with a shovel and kicks the tires, he prostrates himself in the sand and
cries out "All right! I don't care!" At this point, the camera, which has been
serving to articulate Locke's situation and frustration, detaches itself from this
characterological function and slowly pans over the desert and stops. For a brief
moment, narrative level has shifted and we are made aware of the monstrative
presence of the camera. By detaching itself from the task of showing us the
story through Locke's point of view, the camera gives us visual information
directly. As I point out shortly, this information is different from that provided
through Locke's experience.
Another instance occurs after Locke returns from the desert. The sequence
opens with an extreme close-up of the light switch in Locke's hotel room. The
camera, as if distracted from its characterological task (the off-screen diegetic
sounds of Locke preparing for a shower), pans up the white electrical cord on
the white wall upon which several black insects are crawling. This movement
halts when the hotel keeper knocks. The camera pans left to the door as he
enters and once again mediates. In both instances, one where the camera detaches
and one where it attaches, we have a brief exposure to the point of view of the
monstrator, a "revealed" point of view at a more fundamental level than normally
takes place in fiction films.
Branigan calls this type of movement "unmotivated" by a need to serve
character filtration, and says that it "achieves a certain independence from the
diegesis but without becoming an invisible omniscience."" Wandering camera
is not the only possible means for cinematic narration at this level; stationary
shots and montage editing can make omniscient statements as well. But it is the
wandering camera only that reveals the monstrator moving in a time and space
that has no logical place in the story. The more that monstration is revealed the
further away we get from the "effaced" discourse of classical cinema, where
point of view is meant to occur primarily through character.
It is specifically camera movement in an unmotivated situation that gives
the wandering camera a unique sense of "presence" in the diegesis. Under
motivated circumstances, the camera's movement can represent the perceptual

Cinema Journal 32, No. 2, Winter 1993 51

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point of view of a character -subjective camera. Or it can articulate a conceptual
point of view, such as Bruce Kawin's notion of mindscreen,"' best exemplified
in Last Year at Marienbad (1962), where the camera wanders the corridors with
what Kawin calls "fluid tracking." Because these wanderings are accompanied
by X's voice-over narration, the camera's point of view represents the conscious-
ness of the voice-over narrator.
Chatman sees the camera "wander on its own, in an objective, not subjective
manner,"'3 objective in that it does not serve a character's point of view. By its
inherently iconic nature (mechanical image production), wandering camera will
always provide an objective, a perceptual point of view; it always records what
it saw. But this should not be confused with the idea that a point of view beyond
purely denotative recording is not possible from wandering camera, that wan-
dering camera can only "describe." The point of view of the wandering camera
provides in Chatman's terms a "perceptual slant," and "frames the cinematic
narrator's transmission of visual and auditory imagery."'4 The slant provided by
wandering camera, however, may not be limited to the perceptual. All of the
limitations placed on an image by the apparatus are discursive acts and therefore
point to an agent. They are the enunciatory traces to which we might infer,
given enough instances in a number of movies, an implied author.' The narratorial
slant achieved by the wandering camera might therefore reveal an interest or
ideological point of view.
In the two examples from The Passenger, one could say that the wandering
camera is recording setting, being purely denotative, providing concrete infor-
mation. However, in relation to the subject interest of this film, visual concern
over delineating the spatial relationships between an individual and his or her
environment is momentarily reflected upon through what Chatman identifies as
"independent visual authority,"'6 thereby revealing an ideological or interest
point of view of the implied author. Many of Antonioni's films are concerned
with the source of an individual's identity in that many of the characters find
themselves, either by choice or chance, alienated from the cultural discourse
that defines them. In The Red Desert (1964), Giuliana's "schizophrenia," her
perceived inability to function in her various social roles as mother, wife, and
so forth, has ontological, not pathological, significance. The subject interest has
to do not with an individual's personality; rather it has to do with the issue of
dasein, of being-in-the-world. Like the wandering camera, a "presence" that
does not belong to the story world, Giuliana wanders from setting to setting,
social role to social role, but never really fits in.
In Antonioni films the desert becomes the natural space in which characters
find themselves either alienated or freed from the realities of the social discourse
that define them as husband and journalist or arms supplier and revolutionary.
In Zabriskie Point (1970), a young couple meet at a desert spot in Zabriskie
Valley and find temporary freedom from their positions in civilization- one a
revolutionary and criminal by coincidence, the other a secretary serving a

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corporate developer who physically inscribes society into natural space by
building housing developments in the desert.
So the wandering camera's interest in space, in both instances in The
Passenger, is inscribed with Antonioni's well-established subject interest. In one
way this is achieved by a visual meditation on the relationship between a subject
and the surrounding space-the pulling away from the character and a focus
on the desert, and the image of small black insects on a large white wall. In
another way the wandering camera calls attention to the relationship between
the nature of narrative and the nature of our existence. By pulling away from
a character and acting on its own, the wandering camera reveals the enunciatory
act, and with it the ontological suggestion that since characters are the product
of discourse, we, like fictional characters, might also owe our "being" to our
subject positions in language.
Any time a discourse calls attention to itself as discourse, it raises metaphysical
speculation. Citizen Kane (1941) does this, and it is no coincidence that wandering
camera occurs. Aside from the newsreel sequence, most of Citizen Kane is
filtered through the various characters who act as intradiegetic verbal narrators
as well as filtering agents. The wandering camera, however, provides a narrative
presence that reflects the motivation of an extradiegetic presence. Actually, the
opening sequence is monstrative only when it "climbs" the fence; the rest of
the establishing sequence is achieved through editing, through a series of
dissolves. The establishing sequence, therefore, foregrounds narrative agency,
both monstration and narration.
The point of view of the wandering camera in this sequence is not purely
perceptual and denotative, since the camera passes over a fence marked "No
Trespassing," reflecting the entire motivation of the narrative, which is to solve
a mystery, to penetrate, to engage its audience in truth seeking; but at the same
time it keeps the truth elusive. In the final sequence, although the audience
receives privileged information from the narrative agents about the answer to
the mystery sought by the characters, the knowledge about Rosebud does not
solve the problem of understanding Kane's life from one of the many ideological
points of view of the characters.
It is this deconstructive motivation, this resistance to allowing one point of
view hegemony, that inspires the opening camera movements of the two El
Rancho nightclub sequences. The camera rises over the building (and the sign
that tells us where we are) and then "enters" (via a dissolve) through a skylight
in which the glass is intact the first time, when Susan refuses to become a
narrator, and the second time, when the glass is broken and Susan finally tells
her story. The camera promises us a privileged point of view, a promise to satisfy
our desire for closure (the logical code of the mystery convention), which is
ultimately left open.
The opening sequence of Psycho (1961) is not unlike that of Citizen Kane.
The panoramic pan over the city of Phoenix resolves into movement (via dissolve
and boom) to the hotel window where from a clearly voyeuristic point of view,

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we are introduced to the main character of half the movie -Marion Crane.
Again, the point of view is not merely perceptual, but relies on cultural coding
to signify a conceptual narratorial slant-the pleasure of a voyeur. Since
subjectivity has yet to begin, the audience is left to share with the implied
author, via the apparatus, an ideological slant as well--the power of the gaze,
and all that it signifies psychoanalytically. The opening sequence was intended
to be erotic. Hitchcock told Truffaut that he was motivated to create this scene,
as well as the entire movie, by a desire to serve the public's changing taste for
overt sexuality." Of course much has been said about the articulation of such
eroticism in relation to unconscious patriarchal fears of the female image and
the gaze's proximity to violence. In Psycho this is nowhere more discursively
revealed than in the case of the opening sequence, and at the fundamental level
of monstration and narration.
One of the best examples of wandering camera occurs immediately after
the shower sequence. The camera, in an extreme close-up on Marion's eye, pulls
back to reveal her dead stare. But it is more than a face frozen in an expression
of shock, it is a gaze, for her look has direction, at or behind the camera.
Remember that the shower sequence was preceded by Norman Bates's gaze
through the peep-hole, a perspective that we shared through subjective camera.
This constitutes the male gaze to which Marion's stare provides a corresponding
female gaze. As Raymond Bellour observes, it is Marion's "dead eye that
answers.., .the bulging eye of Norman given over to the inordinate desire of
the scopic drive."18 Unlike Norman's gaze, which signifies power, Marion's can
only signify powerlessness, since she has just been violated, utterly acted upon,
and is now dead. The camera then detaches itself from her look and leisurely
pans 180 degrees from its original position and briefly comes to rest on the
newspaper containing the hidden money. It now turns to reveal a view of the
gothic house as Norman's voice is heard exclaiming horror at finding his mother
covered with blood, at which point character once again filters the story.
Obviously, by calling attention to the money, the film has us later understand
the irony that these crimes were of "passion, not profit." Psychoanalytically
speaking, however, there is something more behind the motivation of this shot,
something consistent with the film's interest in the gaze. By pausing on the
newspaper, the point of view suggests that this is the object of Marion's look,
which, had she been alive, would have been articulated by a reverse-angle
subjective camera shot. There is something sinister in the way the apparatus
informs us from its structurally authoritative position that it alone has the power
of the gaze. Feminist psychoanalytic theorists would clearly recognize the
significance of this as a gender-related ideological reflection by the monstrator
that women do not own the gaze-clearly a discursive warning.
Filmmakers of horror and the supernatural have found wandering camera
a useful way to establish a "presence," usually some voyeuristic, vague, and
sinister presence that becomes at some point identified as the perceptual viewpoint
of a flesh-and-blood menace. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) opens with a

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debatable wandering camera, as it glides around the house, peeping in through
a window, moving into the kitchen. Suddenly, a hand reaches out and takes the
butcher knife, then places the Halloween mask over the camera lens. Obviously,
at this point what might have been perceived as wandering camera, now becomes
clearly subjective camera for Jason's perceptual point of view. Aesthetically, for
me this sequence is problematic, since the extradiegetic nature of wandering
camera creates such an unusual presence in the story, that to attribute both
omniscient and filtering activities to the same camera shot and movement
contradicts the codes of this particular type of narration. We simply are not
given enough information in the beginning of this sequence to determine whether
the camera movement is monstrative or characterological.
John Hough's The Watcher in the Woods (1980) uses wandering camera
more subtly. The camera, which tracks the car of an American family who will
be renting a haunted British country house, actually stalks the car, waiting
behind bushes for it to come into sight, tracking it through the woods. Since
this film has a supernatural character (the spirit of the country house owner's
lost daughter), the point of view established by the wandering camera's "pres-
ence" has a logical place in the diegesis. However, this information is revealed
later in the story; so the initial wandering camera movements never resolve into
the concrete subjective camera of Halloween.
Finally, I would like to point out the remarkable, albeit very subtle, use of
wandering camera in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). The camera at no
point wanders to the degree that it does in the preceding examples, and yet its
presence is always marked out when the sense of a haunting entity is required.
Camera movement in this film almost exclusively serves to mediate character,
and yet it always slightly exceeds its characterological function by shifting
distance from the character it tracks with no consistency to its conventional role.
When Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors, the camera should normally
track him at a uniform distance. However, in this film one moment it allows
Danny to gain distance, the next it closes in on him; this is independent
movement marking an independent presence. Always the camera is moving and
tracking, but at the same time it slightly makes itself felt as an unnamed
presence. When tracking Wendy, as she wheels breakfast from the kitchen to
the apartment, the camera keeps pillars and posts between it and her, marking
itself spatially separate. How better to represent the hotel as a presence (the
true haunted house) than at this level of narration? For the ultimate authority
in the story, the "Overlook" hotel itself, is articulated by the foregrounded
activity of the monstrator, made slightly noticeable in the diegesis.
Wandering camera is a unique aspect of cinematic discourse. The value of
camera movement within a single shot is normally that of serving character
mediation. Its "natural" present tense is normally subordinated by its placement
in the narrative's past tense (via editing). When the camera movement of a shot
does not support its mediating role, when it is "allowed" to flaunt its present-
tense existence in the face of the narrative's past tense, then the camera wanders,

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sometimes appropriated as a "semi-presence" in the story world. But in its
purest form, it wanders in the diegesis, having no logical place in the story.
When the camera so wanders, we become aware, because our "classical"
expectations have been disrupted, of a foreign presence. This is the presence of
an authoritative, narratorial agency, revealing a slant that not only contributes
to the nature of the story, but also provides enunciatory sites from which we
might infer film authorship.

Notes

This article came out of my participation in a National Endowment for the Humanities
summer seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, directed by Seymour Chatman.
I am grateful to both the NEH and Professor Chatman. I would also like to acknowledge
the invaluable suggestions provided by my editorial readers.
1. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985).
2. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), 124.
3. Seymour Chatman, "Characters and Narrators: Filter, Center, Slant, and Interest-
Focus," Poetics Today 7, no. 2 (1986): 205-25. See also chapter 9 in Chatman's
Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
4. Andre Gaudreault, "Narration and Monstration in Cinema," Journal of Film and
Video (Spring 1987): 33.
5. Gaudreault, "Narration and Monstration," 32.
6. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977),
153.
7. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (London: Methuen, 1983), 71-85.
8. Chatman, Coming to Terms, 139-60.
9. Edward Branigan, Point of View in Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity
in Classical Film (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 73.
10. Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction
Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), chapter 5.
11. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, 45.
12. Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978).
13. Chatman, Antonioni, 196.
14. Chatman, Coming to Terms, 155.
15. I do not wish to enter into the theoretical debate over the nature or even existence
of authorship, which is aptly summarized in Robert Burgoyne's article, "The
Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Impersonal Narration," Journal
of Film and Video 42, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 7. Here I simply mean that in a number
of films of which historically there was a degree of control over the directing,
editing, and so on, by one or more people, I would point to the collective and
consistent traces of enunciation in a set of movies and, for a better word, "imply"
authorship. For an excellent narratological defense of implied authorship, see Tom
Gunning's D. W Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991).
16. Chatman, Antonioni, 114.
17. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 268.
18. Raymond Bellour, "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion," Camera Obscura nos. 3-4
(1979): 116.

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