Call For Papers Nº 22 (Summer 2024)

Comparative Cinema

THE BODY OF THE VOICE.

ORALITY AS SOUND AND PERFORMATIVE EXPRESSION IN NON-FICTION FILM

Guest Editor: Paola Lagos Labbé.

 
Almost a century after the advent of sound film, it is hard to explain the categoric hegemony of the visual in film studies, which still monopolizes film studies. The coming of sound brought along not only music but also the emergence of voice with all its potentialities, both communicative and expressive. The attention to this fascinating phenomenon that modulated “spoken cinema” has mostly focused on fiction films, and it has basically addressed dialogues and their often-literal uses, which tend to impoverish the expressive interactions of the image. Within that rather orthodox scenery, Marguerite Duras constituted a remarkable exception, as she generated radical detours and dissonances between image and sound in films such as La femme du Ganges (1974), India Song (1975), and L’Homme atlantique (1981).

Within the area of non-fiction films, the last few decades have favored an understanding of essay film as a subjective form that expresses the filmmaker’s conceptual and sensitive thinking by using a first-person voice-over. This voice-over channels comments about the filmmaker’s experience and presents a critical, political and self-reflective understanding of both reality and cinema. At the same time, as essays (from the French essayer, to try or test), they not only present us with already-formed thoughts but they also rehearse these thoughts, expose the thinking processes and develop them during the course of the work.

However, the expressive quality of the voice goes beyond the mere transmission of ideas through words; voice shelters and supports language, but it is not equal to language. The body is a speaker, and voice marks the presence of the body in the sound image; this body is not visible, but it is audible. Some film trends expand the limits of the spoken word to release it from an exclusively semantic function. Thus, they foster its strength as a physical, audible experience that is embodied by a sonic body (LaBelle 2014). In this way, sense and sound interact, overflow their limits and reverberate into each other.   

The human voice can be deconstructed into a series of micro-oralities that go beyond words and their meaning. The sonic body talks, sings, hums, whistles, recites, stammers, babbles and whispers. It laughs, shouts, cries, coughs, yawns, sneezes, hiccups, moans and sighs. These and other actions are bio-communicative sound acts that appear as “an intrusion of voice into the speech” (Díaz 2011) and produce the emerge of an “embodied language that is all voice” (Chion 1999). These oral behaviors give “corpulence” to the sonority that comes from the mouth. Mouth works as a hinge-organ between the interior and the exterior of the body, between oneself and the others, between oneself and the world.    

In the specific field of documentary filmmaking and the essay film, it is crucial to promote discussions around orality and its relationship both with reality and with the image. By problematizing the connections between the regimes of the visible, the audible and the sayable it will be possible to identify coincidences and divergences between image, sound, voice and word, which are expressed through associations between thought, experience, body and reality. Non-fiction cinema is a suitable space to integrate these configurations of form and sense and to project their potentialities—whether communicative, enunciative, informative, emotional, aesthetic, experimental, poetic, politic or identity-based—through different approaches that allow us to consider images, sounds, oralities and micro-oralities as audio-visual elements with equal value.

It is therefore imperative to subvert the traditional academic subordination of sound to image and move towards these oral and vocal dimensions of film. This issue of Comparative Cinema invites contributors to explore and examine expressions of non-fiction films in which the “vocal dispositive” is a central concern, either regarding it as a self-reflective voice-over, or through the very materiality or physicality of the oral—a way to sonically inscribe the speaker’s body into the image—. The dossier welcomes discussions around films that explore oralities and micro-oralities by establishing correspondences and tensions between image and sound, sound and sense, music and singing, sound and body, body and voice, voice and word, buccal and vocal, etc.

Issue 22 of Comparative Cinema is open to receive articles of 5,500-7,000 words that use a comparative methodology to address these issues.

For more information visit https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/193