SOURCE: "The Aptness of Terminology: Point of View, Consciousness and Letter from an Unknown Woman," in Film Reader, No. 4, 1979, pp. 166-79.

In the following essay, Pipolo examines Ophuls's use of point of view in his Letter from an Unknown Woman.

One of the more intricate problems of narrative cinema is the handling of "point of view," especially that of the first person, the "I" of literary narratives. The history of this fictional device in literature is long and complicated, culminating for the traditional novel at least, in Henry James' well-known and exhausting struggles with it, as evidenced in his Prefaces. For film, there is the additional problem, owing to the nature of the medium itself, of sustaining the conviction that what we actually see on the screen is really the restricted view of one individual. The tendency of the film image is to reveal more than might be...