10.54103/2036-461X/19082
application/pdf
2036-461X
19082
39
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
 Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - The Voice in Transition. Cinema, Contemporary Art and Audiovisual Culture
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
22
Projects & Abstracts
2023-01-24
2022-11-22
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
169-171
Cinéma & Cie
Annalisa Pellino
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/19082
169
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
39
en
171
 Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - The Voice in Transition. Cinema, Contemporary Art and Audiovisual Culture
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19082/17551
22
                                                                                       The Voice in Transition
                                                                                       Cinema, Contemporary Art, and Audiovisual Culture
                                                                                       Annalisa Pellino / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
                                                                                       Università IULM, Milano
                                                                                       DOI https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/19082




                                                                                         The voice in cinema has often been confused              primarily in its materiality, as a sounding body
                                                                                       with the word, and dialogues have assumed more             and embodied consciousness, that lies beyond
                                                                                       relevance than the modes of expression. When               language or, at least, on the border between body
                                                                                       in 1982 Michel Chion tried to develop a theory of          and language or, by referring to Julia Kristeva,
                                                                                       sound cinema as talking cinema, he started from a          between ‘“phenotext” (coded semiotically) and
                                                                                       very simple question: ‘By what incomprehensible            “genotext” (coded socially and physiologically)’.7
                                                                                       thoughtlessness can we, in considering what after            From a methodological point of view the
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       all is called the talking picture, “forget” the voice?’2   dissertation assumes the phoné’s paradoxical
                                                                                       After four decades, the stories and theories of            status between embodiment and disembodiment,
                                                                                       cinema have not yet sufficiently developed the             sonic emission and aphonia, between the Self and
                                                                                       pivotal proposal of the French scholar in the light        the Other,8 with reference to the anti-essentialist
                                                                                       of the recent transformations and migrations of            approach of the Voice Studies: they refuse to build
                                                                                       cinema.                                                    a stable ontology or epistemology of the voice,
                                                                                         Starting from this consideration, the research           and dismiss the idea that it can be considered as
                                                                                       accounts for the so-called ‘relocation of cinema’3         a clear identity index, rather considering it as the
                                                                                       in contemporary art and investigates the voice             result of an ‘enculturation’ process.9 Consequently,
                                                                                       occurrences, framing its aesthetic and political           the voice has been framed as a techno-cultural
                                                                                       uses in both cinema and moving image-based art             practice that evades gender, racial and social
                                                                                       practices, considering the first as an aural model         stereotypes. At stake there is the interaction
                                                                                       for the analysis of the second. In particular, the         between different aspects: the physiological
                                                                                       research’s principal aim is to affirm the voice’s          qualities of the voice, its relationship with media
                                                                                       heuristic value for the interpretation of the              and technologies, and its responses to the socio-
                                                                                       relationship between image and sound, trying               cultural context, with clear consequences in terms
                                                                                       to overturn the ‘ontological fallacy’4 of cinema           of cinematic representation.
                                                                                       as a visual medium, both from the technical                  Hence, the first part of the dissertation
                                                                                       and epistemological point of view. Furthermore,            examines different features that help to define
                                                                                       drawing on the idea of cinema as a mise-en-scène           the materiality of the phoné, which concerns not
                                                                                       of bodies, ‘performance oriented medium’5 and              only the body, but also its prostheses, devices
                                                                                       ‘ventrilosquism’6 the voice has been considered            and media environments, trying to answer the


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                      169
following questions: what exactly does this              vocality as a special field of articulation for non-
materiality consist of? How do we go beyond the          white subjectivities (Martine Syms and Arthur
idea, as fascinating as it is elusive, of ‘the grain     Jafa).
of the voice’?10 Particular attention has been paid
to the somatic occurrences of the voice, outlining
a radical phenomenology where humanity and
animality converge in the same expression —
breath, hums, whispers, peeps, vocal mimicries,
shouting and singing voices, and all sorts of
inarticulate sounds — observable in cinema when
it questions the nature–culture continuum and the
female–animal sonic entanglement.11 It has been
the occasion to draw a map of diverse theories on
voice, its cultural meanings and representations12
as their technological roots, with a particular
emphasis on the media-archeological approach.13
   The second part of the dissertation delves into the
‘topology of the voice’14 and follows its transitions
inside and outside image, text, and the cinematic
dispositif, which produce a tension between
narration and ‘attraction’,15 leading to calls for
a continuous reconfiguration of the relationship
between gaze and listening. These passages have
been considered from both historical, theorical
and practical perspectives, firstly highlighting the
shift of interest of the Feminist Film Studies from
gaze to listening occurred during the Eighties
— that meaningfully coincides with the growing
interest of Film Studies for sound; secondly,
taking into consideration a ‘queer aesthetic of the
voice’16 based on the possibility to address the
voice as a form of sonic cross-dressing.
   Finally, the research identifies a body of films
and video-installations that invites us to re-
evaluate the so-called ‘audiovisual contract’,17
that emphasizes the materiality of the voice, and
that makes use of it as an aesthetic and political
gesture. Indeed, the case studies section — that
challenge the stereotypes of representation and
stage the issue of identity from an intersectional18
point of view — has been divided into three
areas which concern the geopolitics of the voice
(Chantal Akerman and Lawrence Abu Hamdan),
the question of the female sounding body and
agency (Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe) and



170                                                                          Pellino, The Voice in Transition
   Notes
   1
     Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Professor Luisella Farinotti (Università IULM, Milano) and Professor
   Alice Cati (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore).
   2
     Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
   Press, 1999), 1 (first publ. 1982).
   3
      Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York:
   Columbia University Press, 2015).
   4
     Rick Altman, Introduction: Four and a Half Film Fallacies, in Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. by
   Rick Altman (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 35–45 (37).
   5
     Rick Altman, General Introduction: Cinema as Event, in Ibidem, 1–14 (9).
   6
      Rick Altman, ‘Moving Lips. Cinema as Ventriloquism’, Yale French Studies, 60.1 (Special Issue
   Cinema / Sound, ed. by Rick Altman, 1980) (New Haven: Yale University Press), 67–79.
   7
      Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin, The Voice as Something More. Essays Toward Materiality
   (Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 8; Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage
   poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
   1974).
   8
      Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Redwood
   City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) (first publ. 2003).
   9
      Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music
   (New York: Duke University Press, 2018); The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, ed. by Nina Sun
   Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
   10
      Roland Barthes, Le grain de la voix (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981).
   11
       Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Éditions de Minuit
   1975).
   12
      Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
   2000).
   13
       Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
   Wutz (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) (first publ. 1986); Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic
   Time Machines. Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
   University Press, 2016).
   14
      Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, Yale French Studies,
   33–50.
   15
      Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’ in The
   Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. by Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
   2006), 381–388 (first publ. 1986).
   16
      Juan A. Suarez, ‘The Sound of Queer Experimental Film’, in The Music and Sound of Experimental
   Film, ed. by Holly Rogers, Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
   17
       Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York:
   Columbia University Press 1994) (first publ. 1990).
   18
      Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique
   of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, in University of Chicago Legal
   Forum, 1, Art. 8 (1989), 7-80.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                     171
