The Frenzy of the Audible: Voice, Cinema, Representation

This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship between image and sound in cinema. Heeding different voices from film criticism (considered as criticism of mainly Western feature cinema) and documentary filmmaking, where the voice is discussed in its narrative and technical function, the author aims at listening to cinema, rather than watching it, in order to hear the mechanism that makes this social and cultural technology work. Though cinema technology allows for a complete separation of the voice from the body that originates it, feature films suture image and voice to create a unitary body for its characters and stories. In documentary film, on the other hand, the audience is led by a voice apparently coming from outside the frame, sutured to no body at all; this voice can taint the representation of the ‘real’ with the uncanny voice of the machine, as in the work of experimental film- and documentary-makers from Lynch to David Cronenberg, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Chris Marker, plunging deeper and deeper into the displacing qualities of the voice of cinema.