Narrative mode where character voice or narration absolutely dominates — voiceover, interior monologue, introspection override image. Godard technique, problematic in dialogue-driven cinema.
The voice takes over the entire space — that is the core problem when you realize in editing that the voice-over, inner monologues, or a character's thought process become so dominant that the image is reduced to mere illustration. This is called vococentrism, and it's a trap that auteur cinema and literary adaptations, in particular, can easily fall into. The soundtrack dominates the visual narrative, not the other way around — and this can be fatal if you're trying to make a film and not a radio play with images.
Godard and the Nouvelle Vague deliberately provoked this — characters speaking directly to the audience, streams of consciousness running for seconds while the camera remains completely static. That was a deliberate method back then, a decided anti-cinema stance. But in drama, in psychological narration, it becomes dangerous. You film a scene where a woman looks in a mirror, and then an off-screen voice drones on for three minutes of inner monologue — that works for a maximum of 30 seconds, then you lose the viewer. Attention shifts to the voice, the image becomes wallpaper. In classic dialogue films, this is absolutely counterproductive: if two characters are conversing and one has a constant stream of inner commentary, it destroys the tension between them.
In practice, this means specifically — either you work visually with editing, focus, movement against the off-screen text, or you radically reduce the vocal level. A voice can work if the image works in parallel, not subordinating itself. The biggest mistake is using the voice due to a lack of visual ideas. You're sitting in the edit suite and realize: "The scene needs depth, I'll put a voice-over on it." That's laziness. Better: edit the scene, mount it, work with music or silence so that the voice — if necessary — becomes a *layer*, not *the* layer. Related to this problem is overnarration and the question of how much subjectivity your narrative style can sustain. In a psychological thriller, an intense inner voice can work if it corresponds rhythmically with editing, music, and camera movement — not if it works against them.