So, in my view part of the engine driving the Internet as a form is the First Person form of storytelling. Whether it’s a fictional blog or a person speaking into a webcam, or a mini-documentary made by someone walking you through the incidents of a story with a hand-held camera, what we’re talking about is First Person storytelling.
Now, there’s nothing new about First Person Narrative. All it means is that the teller of the tale is involved in the story somehow. We use this method in daily life all the time: “I went to the store, and there was only one line open at checkout, and you would not believe how this checkout clerk kept chatting with every customer…!”
But we can also tell fictional stories in the First Person. Daniel Dafoe did this with Robinson Caruso, which was written as the journal of a man stranded on a desert island. Dante tells his fantastical journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven as if he really had been on the journey and was now relating it to us. And, of course, soliloquies from Shakespeare’s plays all depend on the character directly addressing the audience or reader in one way or another.
What is new is that we are not used to seeing this form in Television, Video and Film, which have become our dominant forms of storytelling in recent decades. Where once characters in a play could break the “Fourth Wall” of the story and speak directly to the audience, the traditions and techniques of the 20th Century film and TV demand that, as much as possible, the illusion is created that the characters on the screen are being recorded “objectively.” The idea is that the events on the screen are “really” happening, the characters are really involved in the circumstances and the camera is an invisible presence recording it all passively.
While we are used to seeing people talking directly to the camera in documentaries, it was the rare narrative that used these techniques to build a fictional story.
Some precursors that suggest the possibility of this technique are, for example, This is Spinal Tap.
But notice that the characters are not talking to the camera. The camera is still a somewhat passive observer, and the characters are still going about the business without telling a story or relating directly to the audience. (As characters have done for centuries in plays and novels.)
A closer example of the current Internet style might be The Blair Witch Project. (I couldn’t track down a good clip from the movie, but check out the little bit of footage at the end of the trailer…)
But to find the really perfect YouTube-like moment from film and TV we have to go all the way back to 1987′s Annie Hall:
The piece seems ready made for YouTube!
Of course, Woody Allen’s work in that minute and a half is better than most of the stuff on the internet right now. The form will not save you. But the point is, simply, it can be done, and it can be done well.
There is no reason that we can’t start finding new ways of bringing First Person storytelling to video and film. It might not be dramatic narrative, but it will be narrative.
And while we’re busy figuring out how to “fake” cell phone cameras and characters who happen to be toting around video cameras while they go out on adventures, my guess is we’ll soon be coming up with way ways to incorporate First Person narrative into video and film work in the much more playful and “reality-breaking” methods employed by the theater in centuries past. There’s no reason we can’t find even more compelling and playful ways to have someone tell us a tale intimately — even in a medium like TV and Film.
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