All Knowing: From Documentary Voiceover to Cinematic Omniscience

Scott Ferguson

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During a dramatic moment in Robert Drew’s documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach twice instructs the press surrounding his car to back away. He wishes to communicate with the White House without being overheard. At this point in the film, Katzenbach has returned from a public confrontation with segregationist Governor Geoge Wallace, who threatened to physically block Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood from entering the University of Alabama in defiance of a recent federal court order. After directing reporters to “get back,” Katzenbach ducks into the passenger seat of his automobile and shuts the door. From here, the film cuts to a telephoto shot of the Deputy Attorney General seen through the driver’s side window. Curiously, Drew’s camera is positioned outside the vehicle, apparently sealed off from Katzenbach along with the rest of the news media. Yet when Katzenbach picks up a CB radio and begins to speak to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his voice instantly transcends the boundary between interior and exterior. “OK, go ahead,” he pronounces; “they can’t hear it.”

Students routinely laugh at this bit of dialogue whenever I screen Crisis in my Film and Media History course, which covers global moving image culture from the 1950s to the present. Why? On the face of it, the scene is logically inconsistent. The very audibility of Katzenbach’s utterance instantly undercuts the assurance that his speech is properly insulated from representatives of the media. Students momentarily resolve the contradiction by interpreting the scene as cinematic flex. On this reading, the sequence simply brandishes the Drew team’s exclusive access to the Kennedy administration by flaunting audio they have captured inside the vehicle. Soon, however, students raise suspicions about Direct Cinema’s underlying aesthetic and social commitments. If “observational documentaries” like Crisis promise audiences moment-to-moment events without interpretation or summary, does not this complex combination of cinematography, sound recording, and audiovisual editing betray a reliance on mediation, or precisely indirectness?[1] Of course, this skeptical line of reasoning more or less matches the scholarly consensus on Direct Cinema. More intriguing is where our examination lands: the question of cinematic omniscience. While Drew and Associates expressly repudiate the top-down control over audiovisual elements that omniscience typically implies, Katzenbach’s border-spanning voice indicates that cinematic omniscience may prove more difficult to jettison than defenders of Direct Cinema concede.

In what follows, I propose a novel approach to the problem of cinematic omniscience through a reconsideration of Charles Wolfe's influential essay “Historicizing the Voice of God: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary.”[2] To date, most theorists have conceived filmic omniscience as a formal contrivance that extends or imposes upon the awareness of situated individuals. By contrast, I claim that omniscience constitutes a primary form of collective knowing that modern moving-image culture variously amplifies and differentiates. To this end, I affirm critical insights in Wolfe’s essay. Checking knee-jerk dismissals of classical documentary’s allegedly disembodied and domineering “voice of God” narrator, Wolfe attunes us to the prosocial complexities and possibilities involved in cinematic omniscience. Inspired by this work, I critique film and media scholarship for its tacit nominalism, which unwittingly echoes the ethos of Crisis when it comes to omniscience. Metaphysically, nominalism posits individuation as primordial and collectivity as secondary, no matter how indelibly social individuation is purported to be. Conversely, reviving omniscience as an urgent theoretical problem, I call on scholars to embrace omniscience as a far-seeing instrument for both aesthetic analysis and political world-making. I eschew dominant nominalist impulses that construe omniscience as a subsequent departure from an originary immediacy. Instead, I theorize omniscience as a social capacity that proceeds from the fundamental expansiveness of any and all knowing.

Published in a 1997 issue of Film History, Wolfe’s “Historicizing the Voice of God” bears historical traces of its rhetorical situation. The late 1990s represent the high-water mark of postmodern reflexivity before digitization and the commercialized Internet turned many scholars toward a fresh set of inquiries under the banner of “new media.” If during the 1950s and 1960s, proponents of observational cinema rejected non-diegetic voiceover techniques as “authoritarian, didactic or reductive,” then by the ’90s most critical scholars and filmmakers had assigned the so-called “voice of God” narrator to the dustbin of history.[3] At that time, pioneering postmodernist documentaries such as Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), and Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1991) featured voices that were, in Wolfe’s words, “personal or casual, multiple or split, fragmentary or self-interrogating, lacking a full knowledge of events or the motives and causal logic that a classical documentary would claim to disclose.”[4] Wolfe does not criticize or in any way diminish these innovations in documentary form. Rather, he examines the aesthetic and political function of voiceover in classical documentary in order to trouble an unquestioned story about the past.

Summoning the best inclinations of the New Historicism, Wolfe’s article reveals that there was never a point in documentary’s early history in which voiceover was innocently enjoyed or uncontested. Documentary voiceover, he explains, did not emerge from nowhere. One precedent is the informed “off-stage lecturer” or “off-screen interlocutor,” who accompanied the genre of the illustrated lecture as well as pre-talkie travelogue films.[5] Another antecedent is the non-fiction radio drama, a domain in which fascination with wireless transmission commonly sparked analogies with supernatural forces. In the radio-turned-newsreel series The March of Time, voice actor Westbrook Van Voorhis perfected the bombastic “Timespeak,” which “assum[ed] a power to speak the truth of the filmic text, to hold captive through verbal caption what the spectator sees.”[6] Yet the “stentorian” and “aggressive” pretensions of this formal strategy were widely mocked, as in William Alland’s parodic voiceover performance for the “News on the March” segment in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).[7] Critics, meanwhile, were no less discriminating. While “Frank S. Nugent faulted the World War I compilation documentary, Hell’s Holliday (1933), for having ‘stridently nationalistic’ commentary,” Wolfe reports, “the ‘off-screen narrative’ of Lest We Forget (1935) . . . was praised in the pages of Variety for ‘simple language’ of a kind that neither tried to ‘show for effect’ nor ‘gloss over the gruesomeness of war.’”[8] Wolfe’s essay centers its analysis on voiceover aesthetics in two classical documentaries: The Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens, 1937) and The Battle of Midway (John Ford, 1942). What concerns me in the present context, however, are not these films’ sophisticated vocal constructions, but rather the defamiliarizing questions Wolfe poses about voiceover as an analytical category.

Interrogating the term’s coinage, Wolfe calls attention to voiceover’s protean status as metaphor, as opposed to marshalling the term in strictly denotative and ahistorical senses. As he reminds us, the word voiceover was not commonly used to describe non-diegetic vocal performance in sound cinema until the latter half of the twentieth century, at which point scholars began to retroactively apply the term to previous films. In this way, Wolfe draws attention to voiceover’s topological implications, which is to say, its imagined place within evolving structures of cinematic signification. “A key term in our contemporary critical vocabulary,” he writes, “‘voice-over’ designates a place for vocal commentary by way of a metaphor that is at once spatial and hierarchical.”[9] To wit, off-screen vocalization indicates a realm set apart from the image track and, often, the diegetic space-time it articulates. Voiceover, meanwhile, raises the specter of a vertical relationship, one that locates the vocal track in a sphere above other filmic elements.

To be clear, Wolfe does not repudiate the vertical connotations of voiceover so much as interrogate its ambiguous locus and significance within a wider system of aesthetic devices and terms. “[V]oices are heard over . . . what?,” he queries.[10] The answer, Wolfe suggests, is never entirely clear or stable. Does voiceover somehow “cover” the moving image?[11] Can it be said to “overlay” the diegesis?[12] Does it envelop one and not the other or both at once? Maybe we have it upside down: What would it mean to say that documentary imagery “hovers” over cinematic voices? No doubt, such a description would strike most filmmakers and scholars as ill-fitting if not nonsensical. But why is that the case? Is there something inherent in non-diegetic speech that prevents it from emerging beneath visible images?

Things get trickier when Wolfe considers additional meanings ascribed to voice in our cinematic nomenclature. He notes, for example, that Bill Nichols looks beyond non-diegetic vocal performance to define documentary voice in a broader, figurative sense. Borrowing terminology from the study of literature, “voice” in this context remains irreducible to a documentary’s individual utterances across diegetic or non-diegetic domains. For Nichols, who Wolfe cites, voice is “that which conveys a text’s social point of view.”[13] For Wolfe, however, this shift to an optical metaphor (“point of view”) only muddies the waters. To be sure, metaphors mix all the time, generating contradictory even synesthetic effects that nonetheless do not prevent the world from going round. Still, Wolfe invites readers to contemplate these effects, even if he stops short of spelling them out himself: How are we to characterize the rapport between voice and voiceover in documentary? If, for most commentators, documentary voice encompasses cinematic voiceover, then should we place the metaphorical elevation implied by the latter paradoxically below the former? If voice emits from a “point” and voiceover acts more like a “canopy,” as Wolfe describes it, then how can the former come to subsume the latter?[14] Such quandaries hardly stabilize the problems at issue.

Ultimately, Wolfe aims to rebuke unreflexive condemnations of documentary voiceover as an all-knowing voice of God, which presumably dominates, homogenizes, and subsumes heterogenous filmic elements. He appeals to our inner skepticism: “No one, I assume, takes the ‘voice of God’ metaphor literally,” he reasons. “My question is: do we even take it seriously?”[15] Undoubtedly, Wolfe does not shy away from matters of power, least of all when tracing voiceover’s sophisticated functions across The Spanish Earth and The Battle of Midway. Regardless, as a critical trope, voice of God has become a counter-productive caricature, he argues. It suppresses documentary’s nuances and indeterminacies in the guise of resistance to mastery.

However unexpectedly, Wolfe’s intervention prefigures my own research into the nominalist foundations of modern Western metaphysics and the impoverished model of mediation such nominalism underwrites.[16] (That I was Wolfe's student in the late 1990s makes this no surprise.) As I have argued elsewhere, modern nominalism derives from the writings of Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus, who held that being is only knowable as individual entities.[17] Existence is, on this argument, everywhere the same or “univocal”; it is the same insofar as it is individuated. Even so, being is forever different, according to Scotus, because individuals are necessarily heterogenous. Relationality is thus externalized. Association occurs between self-subsistent individuals who, Scotus theorized, come into relation through contingent encounters.

Enter William of Ockham, who inaugurated nominalism proper by contending that naming and, with it, mediation is a contrivance that is arbitrarily imposed on particulars from the outside. With this, Ockham’s nominalism naturalized a fundamentally antisocial and zero-sum metaphysics that radiated throughout modern Western institutions and epistemologies. Nominalist metaphysics gave rise, for example, to social contract theory and its agoraphobic fantasy of a presocial “state of nature.” It also led to the emergence of austere conceptions of money, not as an inexhaustible public utility but, rather, a finite instrument for private competition and exchange. At the same time, nominalism’s commitment to univocity foments endless paranoia about mediation. Accordingly, being can never be anything but univocal; each individual expression or action threatens to dominate, flatten, or squelch all others. Following this logic, thinkers in the modern West pursue entities, relations, and events that tyrannize and asphyxiate difference from on high without attending to the subtleties and contestations that configure social mediation.

In his own way, Wolfe detects a characteristically nominalist sleight-of-hand in the voice-of-God trope that so pervades documentary discourse. Too frequently, he observes, otherwise thoughtful scholarship reduces diverse, nuanced, and multilayered aesthetics to an external, masterful, and uniform construction. Still, Wolfe does not merely critique this nominalist current in the reigning discourse; he also proffers an alternative hermeneutic for tracing the complexities of voiceover in documentaries. In doing so, he implicitly develops a more capacious topology of mediation. Rather than treating voiceover as an external imposition from above, Wolfe’s topological imaginary recognizes “an indefinite, mutable and potentially fictional realm of vocal commentary that a post-synchronized soundtrack established between . . . the documentary diegesis and . . . the motion picture theater.”[18] Put differently, Wolfe’s topology for documentary voiceover takes seriously what I have called mediation’s “middle.”[19] Mediation’s middle, as I understand it, engenders a primary, broad, and dynamic realm among entangled figures and forms. This middle grants primacy to mediation. It admits no absolute outsides or trade-offs. It also avoids nominalism’s pernicious individualism, exteriority, and paranoia. As Wolfe’s intervention shows, to abide mediation’s middle is not to shirk scholarship’s responsibility to criticize domination, inequality, and exclusion. It is, rather, to heed carefully the ways that social forms make meaning in all of their complexity.

While Wolfe focuses on voiceover in classical documentary in particular, his treatment of mediation opens fruitful avenues for reconsidering cinematic omniscience more broadly. Provided, Wolfe’s essay is not especially concerned with omniscience per se. Omniscience and the related term “omnipresence” are mentioned only once.[20] In Wolfe’s essay, both notions are conflated with the cartoonish voice of God that suffuses documentary discourse. Nevertheless, the topology of mediation Wolfe sets forth in his article harbors significant lessons for film and media scholarship when it comes to cinematic omniscience.

This in mind, I contend that moving-image omniscience constitutes a distinctly modern but vastly underappreciated form of political intelligence. A communal form of sense-making, cinematic omniscience delights in fabricating and investigating widespread ecosocial interdependencies that remain irreducible to auxiliary ties between particular heres and nows. Across fiction and non-fiction, mainstream and avant-garde, cinematic omniscience involves audiences collectively in remote spatiotemporal entanglements among and across disparate social infrastructures. These compound constructions enable communities to reckon with and potentially challenge ecosocial organization at a distance, an operation that nominalist ideologies ordinarily dread, delimit, and disavow. Cinematic omniscience then, however unconsciously, politicizes mediation’s far-flung middle, from which social forms ceaselessly coordinate political life at a remove. To affirm the political value of cinematic omniscience is not, therefore, to excuse dominant motion-picture practices that strive to control, level, and foreclose moving-image forms from an Archimedean vantage. It is, instead, to reclaim cinematic omniscience as a pliable faculty of collective awareness, which neither begins nor ends in nominalist particularity.

Reviving omniscience as an urgent theoretical problem, I follow contemporary literary scholar Anna Kornbluh, who calls on critical theorists to embrace omniscience as a far-seeing instrument for both aesthetic analysis and political world-making.[21] Commenting on literary realism’s infrastructural imaginary, for instance, she asserts that “realism’s signature omniscience and free indirect discourse amount to nothing less than speculative projections of perspectival mergers and radicalizations of the space of presence, to wild projects in infrastructuralized extrusive extension.”[22] Nonetheless, I problematize the latent nominalism informing Kornbluh’s otherwise urgent exhortations. Whereas Kornbluh understands omniscience as a critical withdrawal from immediate experience, I see omniscience advancing from the middle of things, no exodus required. While she often presumes omniscience requires sacrificing situated personhood to achieve impersonal omnipresence, I conceive omniscience as embodied subjectivity’s polymorphic participation in mediation’s voluminous and variegated middle.[23]

In film and media studies, nominalist investments in both individual cognition and situated embodiment have obscured the political significance of moving-image omniscience for some time. Indeed, two frequently opposed approaches to omniscience have generally defined the field. The first is the formalist camp, which includes thinkers such as Hugo Munsterberg, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Edward Branigan.[24] The formalists revel in the aesthetic intricacies that make cinematic omniscience possible. They track specific aesthetic techniques like parallel editing that bridge separate realms. They study myriad means that dilate and delimit spectatorial awareness of narrative causes and effects. Accordingly, formalists refreshingly distinguish cinematic omniscience from pretensions to absolute mastery and knowledge. Yet in nominalist fashion, writers in the formalist tradition nonetheless restrict the scope of their inquiries to the cognition of the individual movie-goer without considering the wider metaphysical and political ramifications of omniscience.

The second group is the theoretical[25] camp, for whom cinematic omniscience remains a troubling metaphysical and political conundrum. The locus classicus for this tradition is the apparatus theory of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry and its critical elaboration by Laura Mulvey’s feminist critique.[26] According to this school, cinematic omniscience offers the individual cine-subject a false and ideologically suspect experience of transcendence that confuses dubious representations with pleasurable sensations while managing anxieties about bodily fragmentation, transgressive voyeurism, and for Mulvey, sexual difference. For all their attention to the metaphysical and political composition of cinema, however, apparatus theorists share nominalist premises with the formalists by anchoring in the uneasy eroticism of the lone viewer. Later, theorists who turn to phenomenology, haptics, and affect will recuperate cinema as a site of meaningful sensory experimentation and delight.[27] Yet they retain apparatus theory’s nominalist focus on individual experience. They also evade omniscience altogether by propagating a model of ambient carnal involvement that privileges material density, vibration, and reciprocity over what Munsterberg felicitously describes as “the whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections.”[28]

Cinematic omniscience is, it turns out, an aesthetic endowment and responsibility that filmmakers and scholars cannot readily evade. Even when forcefully suppressed by Direct Cinema’s aspirations toward beat-by-beat immediacy, cinematic omniscience, as Crisis suggests, leaks through. Wolfe’s topological investigations into documentary voiceover help us comprehend this far-ranging responsibility, not by self-consciously theorizing cinematic omniscience but by threading mediation between misleading nominalist extremes. Wolfe takes cues from both formalist and theoretical camps; but he abandons their attachments to isolated spectators, apparitions of departure and angst over distance. Like Katzenbach’s multilocated voice, Wolfe’s essay cannot be contained within the subfield of documentary studies. His challenge to film and media scholarship transvalues all knowing in motion pictures.

Notes

[1]Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 109-115.

[2]Charles Wolfe, “Historicizing the 'Voice of God': The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary,” Film History 9, no. 2 (1997): 149-167.

[3]Ibid., 149.

[4]Ibid., 149.

[5]Ibid,, 152.

[6]Ibid., 149.

[7]Ibid., 149.

[8]Ibid., 152.

[9]Ibid., 150.

[10]Ibid., 150.

[11]Ibid., 150.

[12]Ibid., 150.

[13]Ibid., 150.

[14]Ibid., 150.

[15]Ibid., 151.

[16]See Scott Ferguson, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics & the Politics of Care (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and “Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?,” Public Culture 37, no. 1 (June 2025): 85-100.

[17]Ferguson, “Analog Critique,” 85-100.

[18]Wolfe, “Historicizing the 'Voice of God,' 154-55.

[19]Ferguson, “Analog Critique,” 89.

[20]Wolfe, “Historicizing the 'Voice of God,' 151.

[21]Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 39-40.

[22]Ibid., 39.

[23]Kornbluh’s presumption that omniscience and related forms of abstraction require withdrawal from an antecedent immediacy becomes more evident in Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2024).

[24]Hugo Munsterberg, Hugo Munsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 95; David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 35, 55, 68, 95, 106; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, Eighth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 74-111; Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 61, 65, 91-92

[25]While the formalist tradition is, of course, deeply theoretical, I use the term “theoretical camp” here to designate a group defined by its more eclectic and affirmative approach to theory. Whereas the formalists largely ground their work in cognitive science and a poetics of cinema to the exclusion of other theories, the thinkers in this second camp draw from a wider and more varied range of theoretical traditions, including psychoanalysis, feminist critique, phenomenology, and affect theory. The label is thus a shorthand meant to capture this group’s broader conception of film theorizing.

[26]Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 104-126; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (August 1973): 6-18.

[27]Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (London: Zero Books, 2010).

[28]Munsterberg, 95.

Scott Ferguson is associate professor in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at University of South Florida and editor for the Money on the Left Editorial Collective. His essays have appeared (or will soon appear) in venues such as Discourse, Journal of Economic Issues, Public Culture, Screen, Liminalities, Qui Parle, Boundary 2 Online, Arcade, Monthly Review Online, Academe Magazine, Naked Capitalism, and the Money on the Left vertical Superstructure. Ferguson’s book, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics & the Politics of Care was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2018.