‘Can’t you hear me?’
The point of view shot is hardly a novel camera angle. We are often presented with an image, whether that might be a low angle shot of the Deadly Vipers staring down at you (Kill Bill Vol. 1), your crush gliding towards you in slow motion (The Royal Tenenbaums), or images of foreign human vessels moving around you (The Terminator). In this standard use of the technique, an image is shown of an environment containing significant objects or persons, and is subsequently followed by an image of the person who has just been viewing the previous image. It immerses the viewer in the narrative, making them connect with the character’s emotional state.
However, in some cases, this subsequent image linking the ‘seen’ image back to the ‘seer’ isn’t shown. This simple, withholding point of view shot is used to powerful effect in the 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered locked-in syndrome (a form of paralysis) following a major stroke. Bauby’s claustrophobia and isolation is illustrated poignantly in the scene after he has woken up from a coma. The moment begins with a doctor staring at the camera (in our point of view, Bauby) in extreme close-up, asking him to open his eyes wide. The camera doesn’t move, remaining static as the doctor examines Bauby’s ‘eye’ with a torch, tells him where he is and introduces himself. We see an orderly in the background briefly, but the doctor’s eye continues to dominate the unmoving screen, with Bauby remaining silent.
So far, as an English monolingual viewer, we have been reading the French words spoken by the doctor in subtitles. When the doctor asks Bauby if he remembers what happened twice over, Bauby’s subtitled response alongside his voice utters: ‘Like I said, vaguely. Images…’. The audience, if they do not know the narrative context beforehand, might assume that Bauby is speaking these words out loud, even though the camera has not yet presented them with an image of Bauby’s expression. As the doctor informs him of the stroke, the doctor’s face completely dominates the screen, and the subsequent tests he performs as he moves his finger back and forth come in out of focus, blurred and then more clear. As the doctor repeatedly asks him to say his name and we hear him do so, we – and Bauby – begin to realise the Bauby’s responses are not spoken out loud but in his head, and he is physically unable to utter intelligible language in his present state. He ‘shouts’ for the doctor to return when he leaves the room, but what the audience hears is just Bauby’s internal monologue.
The static, point-of view shot intelligently and subtly embodies Bauby’s internal turmoil. It never moves from its position in the scene, and never allows the audience to see the figure of the man himself. They are made to struggle and understand the present situation alongside Bauby himself. Bauby’s memoir stands as a testament to the power of the human spirit; the work was completed over a ten-month period, with Bauby using his left eyelid to dictate the prose to a transcriber, who utilised a frequency-ordered alphabet. Bauby sadly passed away just two days after the publication’s release. Describing the experience of locked-in syndrome, Bauby had noted that: ‘I had recently re-read The Count of Monte Cristo, and now here I was back in the heart of that book’. Like Alexandre Dumas’ titular character, he experiences the tribulations of imprisonment, in this case through the body, and his memoir serves as material evidence of his fight to overcome adversity.