Point of View shots:
These shots are used to convey the idea of what someone in
the film was seeing through e.g. a telescope and this was indicated by having a
black circular mask or vignette within the frame. The POV shot, in which
someone looking at something is followed by a cut to a shot taken from their
position without any mask, took longer to appear. In 1910, in Vitagraph’s Back to Nature we see a long shot of
people looking down over the rail of a ship taken from below, followed by a
shot of the lifeboat they are looking at taken from their position. A true POV
shot is introduced by an explanatory intertitle, “what they saw in the house
across the court” in Larry Trimble’s Jean
and the Waif, made at the end of 1910. But a few months later, Trimble made
Jean Rescues, another of the popular
series which has POV shots introduced at an appropriate point without
explanation. After this, un-vignette POV shots began to appear fairly
frequently in Vitagraph films, and also occasionally in films from other
American companies.
An example of an explicit POV shot from the public domain horror fim The Driller Killer putting the audience into the perspective of the protagonist playing pinball with the top shot coming five seconds before the below shot.
An example of an explicit POV shot from the public domain horror fim The Driller Killer putting the audience into the perspective of the protagonist playing pinball with the top shot coming five seconds before the below shot.
Reference:
Mascelli, Joseph, V. (1965). The Five C's of Cinematography:
Motion Picture Filming Techniques Simplified.
