Breath and the Body of the Voice in Cinema

Abstract

The four articles in this special volume of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image investigate the bodily qualities of the vocal utterances that accompany the cinematic experience, whether these emerge from the soundtrack of the film itself or from the audience watching it. Rather than following the tendency in film studies to privilege the linguistic properties of speech, the articles explore the significance of 'non-semantic' vocalisations, such as sighing, gasping, sobbing, shouting, screaming, and laughing. Breathing, in a number of different registers, is a particular focus of attention and, as such, Davina Quinlivan's The Place of Breath in Cinema (2012) provides a reference point that cuts across the different lines of enquiry. More broadly, the volume makes a film-specific contribution to the critical study of voice, a field that has become ever more attuned to the voice's material qualities, such as those interrogated in the analyses that follow.Taken together, the articles consider non-semantic vocal sound through the different phases of the film experience: that is to say, through production, exhibition, and reception. Liz Greene's analysis of breathing in The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman, 1993) is heavily informed by her insight into the production history of both films, evidenced, in particular, through reference to the sound effects archive Sound Mountain. Meredith Ward is similarly interested in the aural consequences of production decisions, this time in the context of the design of the spaces of film exhibition. Her article provides a wealth of historical evidence demonstrating how cinema designers adhered to a code of 'architectural acoustics' that sought to cleanse the space of unwanted vocal sound, whether emitted from the audience or from the cinema's speakers. Ward shows how this attempt to provide a transcendent listening experience was always subject to challenge, compromised by the irrepressible noisiness of the spectators' sounding bodies.Philippa Lovatt holds her focus on what is heard and seen onscreen, offering an extremely sensitive reading of subjective vocal sounds in Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai, 1990) and Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004), two Iranian films that record the experience of war from a civilian perspective. This involves the expression of a point of audition that is suppressed in the dominant modes of the war film, which tend to align the viewer/auditor with the figure of the soldier.Finally, Ian Garwood considers the usefulness of attending to non-semantic vocal sound in a specific context of critical reception: that is to say, the very common circumstance in which a critic wishes to write about a film whose characters are speaking a language he or she can only understand through recourse to subtitles. In this situation, Garwood argues that attention to non-semantic vocal sound may offer some compensation to the critic for her/his incomplete access to the words being spoken. This provides a rationale for tuning the ear in especially to such sounds, and the other contributors to this edition also demonstrate an interest in identifying the circumstances in which vocal utterances that might otherwise go unnoticed demand critical attention. In the films they discuss Greene and Lovatt both identify moments of asynchronicity that denaturalise particular sounds, thereby bestowing on them a particular expressive significance. Ward, meanwhile, describes a situation where, perversely, the more cinema designers strove to silence the bodies of the audiences that filled their auditoria the more likely it was that spectators would become acutely aware of the fundamental sounds of breathing that registered their presence. …