V is for Voice Over

It's April and that means the A to Z Blogging Challenge! This year my theme is film terms.

Voice Over refers to recorded dialogue, usually narration, that comes from an unseen, off-screen voice, character or narrator that can be heard by the audience but not by the film characters themselves.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

JOE GILLIS (V.O.)
Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the Homicide Squad, complete with detectives and newspaper men. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the ten thousand block. You’ll read all about it in the late editions, I’m sure.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Based on the short story by Stephen King "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," this film portrays the life of Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder. The judge gives him a life sentence at Shawshank. When Andy manages to acquire a record album of Italian opera, he plays the music over the loudspeaker so the men in the yard can hear it. Andy gets caught and ends up in solitary, but for him it was worth it. Red tells the story.

RED (V.O.)
I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Ethan Hawke in Gattaca (1997)

Gattaca is a futuristic story of a genetically inferior man who assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel.

VINCENT (V.O.)
It's funny, you work so hard, you do everything you can to get away from a place, and when you finally get your chance to leave, you find a reason to stay.