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 this 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.
