What is the equivalent of "narrator" in films?

And detoxy, I suppose you're right, although sometimes the seemingly rule-free perspective switching of films feels foolish to me as well. For example, at some point I started to be come extremely conscious of the way one-on-one conversations are shot (with the cuts back and forth) and it suddenly began to look really silly to me, and continues to feel silly to this day -- at least if the people are facing each other. There's just something really unnatural about one's perspective jumping back and forth between the two sides so rapidly.

Novels use the conceit that there's a fictional "person" telling you the story -- sometimes a named character with specified relationships to the other characters, sometimes an omniscient, but still fictional, person, wholly "inside" the novel (i.e. not the author).

And, very often, they don't do that either, but have an omniscient narrator who is not an actual "character" inside the novel. (First example that comes to mind: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But there are many.) It might still be a coherent narrator (but then again, something like Citizen Kane has a coherent narrator, but it's one that maps straight on to the director).

Well, actually it mainly bothers me when it's done with over-the-shoulder shots, or when the camera does a near-180. If it's done from the side, as though from a third-party perspective, it doesn't tend to bother me as much.

i recently saw the New World and, like The Thin Red Line, I have to ask, from whose point of view is this story told? it almost seems like the universe itself is telling the story!

Malick seems to get as close as possible to utilizing the sort of objective seeming capacities for cinema, the utter lack of a narrator or point of view (not really a lack of course, but the objective feeling that cinema can sometimes give)--anyway, there is a concerted effort to place everything, and i mean everything, on an almost equal plane.

but of course the objectivity is a conceit of Malick's aesthetic. interesting little paradox.

Traffic just popped into my mind -- all the Mexico scenes are shot with this grainy yellow-ish tint (some sort of filter, I guess). But why? To whom does Mexico look grainy and yellow?

another possible difference between film and books could be the different ways that we perceive images and words. is there a real difference between showing us a tree in a movie and writing "there was a tree" in a book? i think there definetly has to be, to say otherwise seems so ridiculously reductive, but on the other hand im not sure how to specify the difference! is there less mediation? that doesnt work as a solution to me since i dont believe there is an essence that is being mediated (too didactic perhaps. i should say i believe the essence manifests itself in the mediation). any solution i can think of either seems a metaphysical error (such as levels of mediation) or a postmodern copout (an outright denial of essence replaced by a field of infinite differences--another metaphysical error perhaps).

filming things as they are in the world raises another question. for instance im sure Malick didnt alter any of the trees or nature footage in his film (perhaps, ironically, because it would interfere with his aesthetic to do so), but on the other hand I cant claim that the image in his film speaks to the essence of that particular tree or whatever because it's only a representation of a tree, and one from a particular point of view, angle, and context.

is the "woah there's stuff here!" aspect of Malick's films mean "woah there's stuff out here in the world!" or just "woah there's stuff in this movie"?

to say the second seems TOO insular, too reductive. and of course the first seems to gloss over all kinds of problems about representation, narrators, and point of view.