Readings, Listenings, Viewings
The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974): available on the course Blackboard site under “Reserves.”
Film excerpts: Candy Colored Clown, from Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch, 1986); casting call and Llorando, from Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001); the wizard, from The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939); the deactivation of Hal, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
Reflections
Michel Chion, “Prologue: Raising the Voice” and “Chapter 1: Magic and Powers of the Acousmêtre,,” from The Voice in Cinema (pp. 1-14; 15-29).
Steven Connor, “What I Say Goes,”from Dumbstruck (pp. 3-43).
Mladen Dolar, “The Physics of the Voice,” from A Voice and Nothing More (pp. 59-81).
Questions
Humans have been fascinated by the idea that a voice could detach from a body well before the dawn of motion picture (which, you’ll recall, initially was silent). If, with the help of film and its cultural dominance, we got used to the notion that voices and bodies could part from one another, we might still wonder whether we ever got comfortable with it. In this week’s readings, we’ll encounter familiar words like soundtrack, voiceover, and overdub—some of the ways of substituting recorded voice for live voice in filmmaking—as well as less familiar terms like “acousmêtre” (Chion) and “object voice” (Dolar). For Chion and Dolar, words like these hint at the uncanny feeling that arises when voices become disembodied, a discomfort that film, perhaps above all other media, is happy to exploit. Thus! Both in reading this week and in watching/listening, we become familiar with a variety of wonderfully bodiless voices, and speculate at what disembodiment does to/for voices—does it free or enhance them, vex or empower them? How do we pin down the source of uncanniness, when it arises? How do we describe it? How can a voice be an object? And what, pray tell, is the “object voice” anyway? Be prepared to answer this last question!
Exercise
Exercise: compose a minute (or more) of acousmatic voiceover. That is, make a voice heard in a setting where it is not diagetically present, as a sport-caster does, or a detective in a film noir, or a singer on the soundtrack, etcetera. Your aim—and you can draw on the full range of examples and theories in play this week—is to set up a challenging, provocative relation between the sound of a represented space and the voice voiced over it. Your submission could take the form of a script which identifies the scene, and transcribes the voiceover; or a recording to be played in tandem with and event, or in a particular place at a particular time, or over another recording or a video; or, if you have the technical chops for it, a video with embedded sound etc. All formats equally valued. As always, please provide two- to three-hundred words of commentary, which should situate your project in relation to the readings for the week.