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most important elements in film art, sound makes the movie change from a purely visual media into the combination of audio-visual media. Unlike light travels in straight lines, sound spreads Omni directionally as well as the receiving of human ears. Thus, the filmic scene cannot limit the infinite continuous voice space. As has noted, sound cannot be repelled, the sounds around will inevitably invade the close-up, in such occasion, what we got is not light and shade, but sound itself. Whatever how narrow the close-up photography shows, the sounds in whole film can be heard. This kind of phonating body occurs outside the movie, we call it off-screen voice, or voice-over. Many theorists and critics and filmmakers have reiterated many times, essentially, film is a kind of visual media, the pictures are far more important than any other film elements. Therefore, in the movie, the voice-over narration is seen by many people as a literary method.

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2.2 The Background of Voice-over
As a constituent part of the film sound, voice-over’s study was lagged behind the practices. Voice-over was used abusively in Hollywood’s films in 1940s-1950s, thus it brought huge damage to the film art performance, and people also had the bias against the voice-overs, they deemed that the voice-overs in the movie will disturb the flow continuity of the pictures, thus destroyed the integrity of the pictures. The application of the voice-over blotted out the independence of the film, so directors at that time dominated the film by literature, which was thought as impotent in film-making. Such a profound misunderstanding of the voice-over maybe was caused by the deficiency of the voice-over’s theory. When sound plays a more and more important role in films, many theorists and scholars all realized this problem. Research on the relations between sound and pictures, the functions of the sound and sound characteristics can be seen in the works of David Bordwell, Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin such film theorists. Even Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Wayne Clayson Booth kept a watchful eye on the significant role which sound played in movie. What disappointed us is that they paid little attention to the voice-over, partly because limited by the times and it was not very abundant of using voice-over in film-making at that time. Study to the voice-over was coerced in the study of sound. But when it appears independently, voiceover was linked up with certain movie. So, in the vast ocean of film theory studies, voice-over met us in film unexpectedly, what disappointed us is that we got more beauty of sensibility than beauty of reason. As one of the most measuring tools of literary expressiveness, the study to voice-over must be connected with narrative feature. It has been known that researches on voice-over’s thesis were rare, among these, a comparatively constructive paper was produced by Seymour Chatman in which he combined theory with certain movies, elaborated the meaningness which voice-over narration happened together with pictures from the perspective of narration.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework ....... 24
3.1 An Overview of Figure-Ground Theory ...... 24
3.2 Figure-Ground Segregation .... 25
3.3 Summary .... 32
Chapter Fo