Keeping moviegoers in the driving seat

First-person filmmaking has captured our imaginations for decades. Is using technology to improve things just a waste of time and money?

AFTER THE discovery of an abandoned car on a ferry and a shot of its driver's corpse washed up on a beach, Ewan McGregor is present in every scene of The Ghost, Roman Polanski's new film. He's the film's eyes and ears, our surrogate in the story, our entry-point into this world. The only point at which we're privy to information McGregor doesn't have is in the film's final shot.

Polanski excels at this: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, The Ninth Gate, Chinatownand The Pianistare each filmed from their protagonist's point of view so seamlessly we might as well be inside their heads. It's as near as a film can get to the first-person voice of written fiction without resorting to voiceover narration.

Alfred Hitchcock was another master of the first person. We watch Rear Windowfrom the viewpoint of James Stewart, who is watching from the apartment where he's laid up with a broken leg. In Vertigo and North by Northwest, we tag along with Stewart or Cary Grant, as mystified as they are, until, almost grudgingly, the director cuts to another point of view to explain what's going on. Part of the shock effect of Psycho, of course, is that our point of view is abruptly yanked away when our heroine takes a shower, forcing viewers to transfer allegiance to the nearest person at hand. Who happens to be Norman Bates.

Naturally, when we're seeing events through a protagonist's eyes we're also prone to making their mistakes. Or hearing with a protagonist's ears, in the case of surveillance expert Gene Hackman in The Conversation, where, like him, we're nudged by sound editor Walter Murch into realising too late we've misinterpreted a vital line of dialogue. But whether we're exploring Pandora with Sam Worthington or Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio, we're now so familiar with the conventions of the first person viewpoint, we take it for granted – whenever there's a close-up of a character looking at something, we assume the next shot will be of whatever they're looking at, and so on. Subjective camera that extends beyond a few moments, on the other hand, can still feel gimmicky or even disturbing. We've got used to the camera standing in for slasher-movie psycho killers, a device used to creepy effect by John Carpenter in Halloween. But the impressionistic blur of the first reel of The Diving Bell and the Butterflytraps the viewer in Jean-Dominique Bauby's locked-in syndrome so successfully that, at the screening I attended, one stricken filmgoer had to be helped from the cinema.

Even more troubling are the virtual reality sequences in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days,a film that looks startlingly prescient in view of today's voyeuristic YouTube culture. But subjective camera work can also work in comedy; I love the shocked reactions to the unseen Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professoras he strolls the street after drinking his potion – all leading up to the revelation that he's not a hideous Hyde-like monster after all, but an ultra-smooth Dean Martinesque lounge lizard in a snazzy suit.

To date, the only commercial movie to use a subjective viewpoint throughout is Lady in the Lake, seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe (played by the director, Robert Montgomery, who can occasionally be glimpsed in mirrors) and in which the camera gets punched, blows cigarette smoke into a cop's face or turns to ogle a dame.

"You play the starring role!" trumpeted the trailer in a foreshadowing of today's interactive video games. The only memorable sequence in Doomis when the ho-hum action temporarily switches to the sort of first-person shooter on which the film was based, but so far, no one has dared to extend this conceit to 90 minutes. Or maybe they've just concluded that gamers would rather play than watch.

But what with HD and Imax attempting to suck viewers into the action as never before, and everyone having to watch blockbusters through 3D specs, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is plotting to replace the subtle first-person techniques of Polanski and Hitchcock with virtual reality headsets.

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