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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252072673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2006 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
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into the vortex
female voice and paradox in filmBy Britta Sjogren
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2006 Britta SjogrenAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-07267-7
Prologue
voices, vortexes, and dialectics
The propositions offered in this book arise from my love of classical cinema-in particular my fascination with those films that bear a female voice-off. Beyond these affinities, it has been my aim to question, refute, and rebut some strongly entrenched theoretical assumptions that have led many feminist (and other) critics to dismiss Hollywood films as invariably and monolithically "male-centered," as catering to a phallocentric gaze alone, as occluding the feminine, and as containing the woman, and her desire, within not only images that objectify her, but inside narrative structures that constrict and oppress her subjectivity and point of view. These texts need not be looked at so pessimistically. Feminine difference is a positive structuring force within these films-one sustained, rather than stifled, through the apperception of contradiction on the levels of consciousness, point of view, and discourse. Indeed, an orientation that presumes and insists that the woman cannot speak or be heard in the classical cinema may bar us from perceiving ways in which the feminine is represented, eventually suppressing what we seek to find.
Filmsfrom the 1940s possessing female voice-off offer a particularly generative vantage point from which to address these concerns and to rethink prevailing critical perspectives on the classical cinema. More than any other period in film history (aside from the 1970s feminist and other avant-garde movements), 1940s Hollywood favored this formal characteristic. Alongside the enthusiastic voice-off experiments of the film noir cycle proper, studios produced a veritable rash of films bearing female voice-off during the '40s-with a few examples trickling into the 1950s. These films cross genre lines, ranging from melodrama (Letter from an Unknown Woman), horror (I Walked with a Zombie), and noir (Raw Deal), to gothic (Secret beyond the Door) and combat films (So Proudly We Hail). Generally popular and classically styled films, they aimed to speak across class and gender, unlike "art" cinema movements, which address a narrower, more elite audience. Produced for general audiences, these 1940s films were tailored particularly to appeal to women. Their themes often directly addressed the home-front experience (Since You Went Away, So Proudly We Hail). Also, through more indirect representations of women facing difficult choices, separation from loved ones, and performing their "duty" under emotional strain (Humoresque, All This and Heaven Too), these films often made reference to the challenges newly independent women faced during wartime.
Though frequently directed by "authors" like Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, and Joseph Mankiewicz, these films were produced under corporate, capitalist conditions and were thus quite clearly imbricated in the patriarchal system that engendered them. Moreover, most of the '40s films bearing this formal characteristic (and indeed all of the texts discussed in this book) were directed by men rather than women. Still, this book looks for feminine subjectivity within these films as a positive structuring element, a dynamic contradiction, rather than as a "subversive" thread woven in or "breaking out" of the text, somehow inserted there by a female filmmaker resisting patriarchy behind the scenes.
Films of the 1940s are of interest in this context precisely because they rise out of a period in which the relation of sound to image might be described as conventionally stable. Whereas in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, Hollywood cinema was still in a state of flux, "adjusting" to the discursive and formal possibilities and challenges ushered in by the introduction of sound, by the 1940s the industry had successfully negotiated this "transitional" phase. Thus, this book takes an opposite tack from a feminist position that argues, "if we are to have any hope of finding a break in the hegemony of classical style (silent or sound), a time when a woman's voice could be her own, we must look closely at a limited period in American film history when the conventions of cinematic representation were for a time in crisis." Indeed, one could say that in the 1940s, the cards were, in a sense, doubly stacked against the possibility for feminine subjectivity to be expressed through voice-off (or any other formal aural component). Not only do films from this period bear the political and discursive limitations imposed generally by a powerful representational monopoly (the studio system), but they are also representatives from an era in which sound's signifying "difference" had evolved from an awkward and often foregrounded formal "attachment" to a highly conventionalized, firmly integrated element of film form. Thus, the sheer unlikelihood that such films nonetheless offer a space for the feminine to be spoken motivated me, in part, to focus on them.
Representing the 1940s (or any era) as "stable," however, is inherently problematic-a generalization that is at odds with the larger spirit of this project. Representation proliferates: meaning is anything but static, despite the presence of stabilizing codes or conventions that may anchor its progress. At any point in history, contradictions-representational, discursive, ideological-exist in tension with a dominant order. On one hand, the choice of this era is decidedly pertinent for this project; on the other hand, one might choose another "era" (a subjective category in itself), a single year, or even a solitary film as an arena within which to study the process by which difference is sustained in film. This is not to say that historical context is irrelevant-any film or group of films potentially examined here would have been subject to the times and conditions in which they were produced. My project, however, is not "historical" in the sense that only these films at this historical point could give rise to the speculations that follow. Rather, these specific films provide an especially apt historical context within which to explore the theoretical issues at stake in this book. They also provide an arena within which to illustrate a method and model of analysis that expressly parts company with a strong feminist tradition that looks to "subversive" film genres, female authorship, formal ruptures, "progressive gaps," and periods of representational "crisis" in order to find the feminine. This project demonstrates the ways that such discordant elements may structure all films-the ways in which the feminine, too, may structure all films. Certainly, I see the role of sound, and particularly the female voice-off, as a marker of "difference," an undeniable asset that marks the creative flex of contradiction that runs through the group of films examined here. As Rick Altman has put it, "Cinema changes, and the action of sound is one of the prime reasons for that change."
Still, to assert that historical context plays no role in the selection of these films for this study would be false. Despite their masculine "authorship," the films analyzed in this book all attempt to address a woman's subjective experience in some way, reflecting the industry's efforts to capitalize on the World War II home-front audience's new spending power. Targeted to this newly dominant, independent female market, these films articulate and respond to a socio-historical context within which the "voice" and the increased discursive visibility of women was a pressing issue. Not only are the narratives generally focused on female protagonists' negotiations of romantic, psychological, financial, or political problems, but the female voice-off strongly foregrounds the women characters' speech. There is no pressing need here to revisit the historical circumstances of wartime propaganda and capitalism's exploitation of women as consumers and second-class citizens. Others have strongly argued to these purposes, with depth and persuasive force. Rather, this book looks at these films from another perspective, to consider the problem from the side of the female subject who speaks (and listens) from within patriarchy. In this regard, the appeal of these films to more contemporary audiences is striking, for, clearly, they were not addressed to the women and men who study them today. Yet, as the legacy of feminist film theory since the 1970s plainly illustrates, these films remain compelling sources of pleasure, antipathy, debate, and fascination. (One could even argue that these films are more pleasurable for us today than they were for their intended audiences, for although these were popular films, they were not all successful films: unlike Rebecca and A Letter to Three Wives, for example, both Secret beyond the Door and Letter from an Unknown Woman were financial train wrecks. Whether all these films "spoke" to their contemporary audience is something difficult to affirm. It is clear, however, that these highly contradictory texts speak to us.)
Their cult-like status for many contemporary theorists was an important consideration in selecting these works. I wanted, on one hand, to propose my theses in regard to films that had been, so to speak, already run "through the mill" and about which, one might fear, there is "nothing more to be said," with the aim of opening up a fundamentally new way of looking at these canonical texts. Rather than searching out obscure films to render my arguments, I wanted to test them against texts that have, by virtue of their critical "popularity," proved to be of central importance to the field. On the other hand, I chose these films because of their strong affective pull. I had to question why and how I "loved" these films-whether my subjectivity was at stake or obliterated as I listened to the voices-off that leave such an indelible mark on the mind. Why did I feel that these voices manifested a powerful dissonance, something that I myself could exploit while making films?
The initial research for this volume coincided with the writing and directing of my first feature film, Jo-Jo at the Gate of Lions, and I was deeply absorbed with the tangible challenges facing any feminist filmmaker. Searching for ways to convey feminine subjectivity in film, for strategies to address other women, for a narratological means of displacing a "centered" objectifying point of view, I looked to these classical films as question marks, as sites of problems and possible solutions. My perspective on the issues raised in these pages is thus indelibly marked by the sense of urgency I have felt as a woman trying to "speak" through film. This book reflects, moreover, my longstanding effort to reconcile the infamous divide between theory and practice-a dialectic that has structured my own life as both scholar and filmmaker. As my theoretical interests have propelled my creative work in specific directions, so, too, has my creative work come to influence my perspective on theory. Making films has forced me to look for solutions to problems that theory suggests are nearly insoluble. A remarkable sense of freedom comes from such a dilemma: a certain naivete allows one to take action as if it were possible. I must assume a woman can speak through film, and that feminine subjectivity can find expression within patriarchy: this stance encourages me to question theoretical truisms I find stifling. My own practical experiments with sound, voice-off, and narrative structure, then, bring me to many of the conclusions I offer in the pages to come. The time I have spent designing, editing, and mixing sound has also rendered me particularly sensitive to the possibilities of sound and voice, and has assisted me in appreciating the complexity of the sound tracks analyzed here. An intricate technology serves sound recording, editing, and re-recording, facilitated by the controlled use of microphones, digital audiotape (DAT), Nagra audio tape recorders, magnetic film, digital editing software, mix boards and the like. Through these tools, these apparatuses, sound is worked, directed, and manipulated; in fact, in a sense, sound is frequently more consciously crafted than the visual image. Where the image often contains many accidental and unforeseen elements that surface within the "real space" where the filming takes place (play of light, weather, etc., especially in on location shooting), the creation of a sound track is more often completely contrived-created artificially in an independent process and composed with elements that were not necessarily present during the filming.
Sound thus emerges as a parallel process, powerfully structuring the meanings available to the spectator of a film. It is by way of stressing this "parallel" status of sound, moreover, that the term "voice-off" is used throughout this text, rather than the more traditional "voice-over." I prefer the term "off," in part, because it registers an independent space. Whereas "over" suggests a top "layer" or cloak of some kind, "off" connotes otherness- a distinctness that moves alongside, "elsewhere." In this sense, "off" best evokes the tension of a dialectic to the image, a vital relationship to preserve in descriptions of the voice. Indeed, though the analyses here concentrate on the asynchronous use of the voice, the question of the synch voice is never far afield. I focus on films that stress this apparent separation because they amplify and render more obvious the degree to which all voice-all sound-could be said to be "off." All sounds, that is, are equally separate from the image track in that they are only "married" in the final instance, brought together in the composite film print: prior to this, they are separate elements which can be "placed" anywhere one wishes relative to the picture. In distinguishing "synch" from "non-synch" sounds as if they are in some ontological way quite opposite from one another, we may be forgetting the artifice of any connection they hold to the image. Synch, in this sense, is an arbitrary concept-for one "synchs up" "non-synch" sounds with as much diligence as "synch" sounds in film production practice. Thinking about synch as also "other" and "off" helps one keep in mind the multiple significations generated by any voice (or sound) during a film viewing.
In French, voix off stands in for any voice which registers as non-synch-whether a narrating voice that is never seen, a voice emanating from a character who stands just offscreen, or an interior monologue expressing the thoughts of a character visible to us. I find this idea useful in responding to the taxonomies of voice that others have prepared before me. Both Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman have taken great care to discriminate between different "kinds" of voice in cinema. Doane's categories seem coined by way of preexisting tropes: (1) synch; (2) voice-off (where a character speaks from offscreen but is not seen); (3) interior monologue (where we see the character and hear his or her asynchronous voice); and (4) disembodied voice-over (no visible character or designated diegetic figure-usually found in documentary). Silverman takes these categories and remaps them expressly in terms of "embodiment": (1) synch sound (which she suggests binds the female film subject to the prison of the objectifying image); (2) the floating voice (one that at times emerges as detached, at others, attached to a specific female body in the film and thus enjoys a certain degree of subjectivity or resistance to classical cinema's normal vising in on the female body); and (3) the disembodied voice (a voice entirely without visual locus during the course of the film, which Silverman understands to be the most resistant to oppressive patriarchal psychology). The problem of the body that is broached in Doane's article becomes, within Silverman's account, the ne plus ultra of the voice-the critical focus of the problem. Hence, Silverman's schema unfolds as a complex grading of voice embodiments, from "disembodied voice-over" and "embodied voice-over" to (male) synch speech that is "coded" as relatively "exterior" to the diegesis and is thus more "disembodied" than certain (female) voice-overs. Within this demarcation (which Silverman spells out most clearly in her article, "DisEmbodying the Female Voice," but which she expands with great flourish in The Acoustic Mirror) an ideal (under a feminist optic) seems implicit in the "disembodied" voice, which, as she describes approvingly, is "freed from its claustral confinement within the female body."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from into the vortex by Britta Sjogren Copyright © 2006 by Britta Sjogren. Excerpted by permission.
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