Beyond the silence of the voice: Leos Carax’s Annette and silent cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cinema’s relationship with the voice is passionate and enduring – perhaps nowhere more so than in silent cinema. This article takes the Lara Feigel’s experience of being supervised by Laura Marcus for a PhD on silent cinema as the basis for an exploration of sound and silence in film. Using Mladen Dolar’s theory of the voice, it reads Leos Carax’s Annette as a film fascinated by the tropes of silent cinema and specifically by its play with the presence and absence of the voice. If for Dolar the voice is a desired object, then in this case it’s an object that can literally be transferred from character to character. In the end, Carax’s promise is that the voice can be a vehicle of subjectivity after all.