In his essay ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, Pasolini identifies a stylistic device in the work of innovative modernist auteurs which, given the expressive ambiguity it generates in their films, represents for him a vital element of poetic cinema: the free indirect point-of-view shot. According to Pasolini, free indirect discourse ‘is, simply, the immersion of the filmmaker in the mind of the character and then the adoption on the part of the filmmaker not only of the psychology of his character but also of his language’ (2005: 175). However, as Pasolini is here concerned not with language but with the language of images, the free indirect style will be manifest visually. The filmmaker ‘cannot make use of the formidable natural instrument of differentiation that is language. His activity cannot be linguistic; it must, instead, be stylistic’ (178, emphasis in the original). It must, in other words, be contained within a shot. The shot will convey a character’s point of view but, unlike an ordinary point-of-view shot, the free indirect style, like its counterpart in the novel, will depict simultaneously the point of view of narrator-filmmaker and character. Although it may appear to convey the character’s point of view directly, the traces of the narrator’s authorship it contains create an irresolvable tension, a duality of expression, a hybridity of consciousness, a ‘mutual contamination’ of worldviews (180).

This creative functioning of character at the ‘compositional’ level of a film can also be achieved on the soundtrack. Pasolini too hastily relegates free indirect discourse to the linguistic sphere, largely perhaps because he defines it from the point of view of the screenwriter creating film dialogue, and not from that of its function within a film’s narrative. It would seem standard practice for screenwriters and filmmakers to write dialogue, as Pasolini suggests, by attempting to put themselves inside their characters’ minds and to adopt their diction. But might there not be instances in which speech, too, operates in the free indirect mode of cinema – that is to say, not only linguistically but also stylistically? When characters describe their thoughts, feelings, actions or experiences in a reflexive manner (that is, to themselves, even if also to another), and this activity becomes for a time the primary narrational event of the film, these characters step into the role of storyteller. They become both subject and object of their utterances. Their act of narration appears to displace that of the film’s narration, even while continuing to be contained by it, thereby generating a duality of expression, a compositional ambiguity – and also often an interpretative ambiguity for the viewer.
 
Source: The Creative Voice: Free Indirect Speech in the Cinema of Rohmer and Bresson, David Heinemann Middlesex University, Google, PDF