Roundtable: Wild Sounds and Women's Voices

Abstract

This roundtable discussion was conducted on October 19, 2016 with, Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue, the programmers for the fall 2016 Flaherty NYC program Wild Sounds during the Colgate/Flaherty Distinguished Global Filmmaker Residency with Sandra Kogut. We were joined by filmmakers Mary Helena Clark, Penny Lane, and Aura Satz. Wild is a technical term for an audio recording done independently of the main shoot. It is recorded without being synchronized to an image, though it may be synchronized later, in postproduction. For our Flaherty NYC program, the notion of a wild sound, with its connotation of autonomy and a relation to an image track that is not necessarily subordinate to it, offered a conceptually rich way of considering the placement and use of women's voices in film. The series explored the variety of ways in which women are heard in film, drawing on the gendered distinction between women's voices, closely allied with the body and pre-linguistic sound, and those of men, associated with the making of meaning, as theorized by Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman, and Adriana Cavarero. Against the dominant structures privileging male speech over female sounds, Wild Sounds explored the affective, sensorial, and political dimensions of women's voices. The notion of wild sound also offered a way of subverting the documentary expectation of sync sound realism and opened the practice to more experimental forms. The filmmakers who joined us for the roundtable, all of whom have used voice and sound in unconventional ways, represent the heterogeneity of documentary form today. Indeed, we chose this group because their innovative uses of sound are very at the heart of their redefinition and expansion of contemporary documentary practice.