The Acoustic MirrorMonta DravanteLsma Zviedre-PitkeviaDiana KladkoTatjana GlogovacAnete Trba

The ContentLost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A PrologueBody Talk The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and CompensationThe Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: ChoraDisembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist CinemaThe Female Authorial Voice

ObjectivesTo show that cinema has the potential to reactivate the trauma of symbolic castration.

To establish a relationship between symbolic castration and traumatic discovery anatomized by Freud.

To try to demonstrate that there is a castration that precedes the recognition of anatomical difference (sexual difference).

Jacques Lacan Mirror Stage Separating Self from OtherThe history of the subject who rediscovers himself within cinema occurs through a series of divisions, many of which turn on the object.The first of these divisions occurs at the mirror stage when the child catches sight of its actual reflection. Trough all these divisions, the child acquires its own identity. The partitioning off of the part objects is experienced as a castration. Thus the subject can never be whole or complete (because of all the divisions) for which it consequently yearns.The entry into language is the juncture at which the object is definitively and irretrievably lost, and the subject as definitively and almost as irretrievably found.

Film theory (1)Film theory has been haunted since its inception by the specter of a loss or absence at the center of cinematic production, a loss which both threatens and secures the viewing subject.

The identification of woman with lack functions to cover over the absent real and the foreclosed site of productionlosses which are incompatible with the "phallic function" in relation to which the male subject is defined.

Film theory's preoccupation with lack is really a preoccupation with male subjectivity, and with that in cinema which threatens constantly to undermine its stability.

Film theory (2)Scholars have different opinion concerning films theory but they all agree on one thing: they conceptualize the transition from referent to cinematic sign as a cut. They all frame their spectacle in a such a way that all links with the object are cut.

Metz uses the term of castration to describe cinemas structuring lack, thereby foregrounding the viewer's very personal stake in the loss of the object .

Metz not only refers to the loss of the object as a castration, but he suggests that the viewer protects him- or herself from the trauma of that castration through defensive mechanisms similar to those adopted by Freud's male childdisavowal (denial) and fetishism.

Cinema is founded on the lack of the object.

Sexual difference (1)Jacqueline Rose has sharply criticized Metz and Comolli for what she considers to be their misappropriation of the concepts of castration, disavowal, and fetishism, suggesting that it is a strategy for avoiding the whole issue of sexual difference in cinema.

Rose proposes that the lack is somehow related to the lack which preoccupies Freudthat woman functions within classic cinema as a representation of the losses which precede sexual difference as well as those through which sexual difference is established.

Hollywood plays more than a reproductive role in the construction of sexual difference. Cinema has contributed to revisualization of sexual difference.

Sexual difference (2)Since the publication of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1976, feminist film theory has focused a good deal of attention on the coding of the female subject as inadequate or castrated within dominant cinema.

Like Freuds little boy, cinemas male viewer finds the vision of womans lack threatening to his own coherence. Classic cinema offers two possible resolutions of this crisis: disavowal through fetishism, and avowal accompanied by disparagement.An item of clothing or another part of the female anatomy substitutes for the organ which is assumed to be missing

ConclusionsCinema is founded on the lack of the object.

The viewer of classic cinemawhether in fact a man or a womanidentifies with the look of the male protagonist, experiencing with him the anxiety of castration and the pleasure of its neutralization. The source of unpleasure is externalized in the form of the female body. It can be seen (and heard). (Mulvey)

Although womans castration is always anatomically naturalized within Hollywood films, this castration in fact excludes her from symbolic power privilege.

In classic cinema the female body is the lack.

Sound

Difference between the original sound and the recorded and reproduced sound.

The act of listening to a film is as fully structured as the act of viewing the film.

Voice closes the gap between the signifier and the signified.

SynchronizationSynchronization anchors sounds to an immediately visible source.

Compatibility of the voice to the body (sexual difference).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6CuBK0cgX4&list=PL7A3D231969F9B81C&index=13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wI4jJq98tU

Deviations from Synchronized Sound (1)PostdubbingJuxtaposes voices with images after the latter have been produced and edited.The actors may be the same or different.The aim is the complete illusion of perfect unity.Voice-offOstensible source is not visible at the moment of emission.Extends the boundaries of the fiction beyond what can be seen to what can be heard.

Deviations from Synchronized Sound (2)Voice-over

Occupies a different order from the main diegesis (temporal and/or spatial dislocation);

Often functions as a prologue or an epilogue;

Can speak:From a position closely adjacent to the events;From a position of superior knowledge.

Deviations from Synchronized Sound (3)

DisembodiedMale voice prevailshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfH3aY-Qy6I (male)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9hhjl1cC1A (female)

EmbodiedAs soon as the source of the voice is revealed, it becomes decrepit and mortal;Can be autobiographical and self-revealing (internal monologue).

Diegetic InteriorityAt the level of sound and image, Hollywood protects the male subject from unpleasant self-knowledge by requiring the woman to stand in for him.The faculty of hearing is privileged over the faculty of speech.Strategies for situating the female voice within the exaggeratedly diegetic space:The capacity to over-hear (e.g. inner textual space);The talking cure (the woman is obliged to speak);Submersion of the female voice in the female body (accent, timbre, speech impediment).

Maternal VoiceA blanket of sound, extending on all sides of the newborn infant an emblem of importance and entrapment.Functions: language teacher, commentator and storyteller.Original prototype for the disembodied voice-over in cinema.Female voice is identified with noise, babble or the cry.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4AzrUO3D1wThe acoustic mirror.

Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Chora (1)The chora the self is not recognized, as the child sense of being is blended into its world and mother in something close to a continuation of being in womb.

The chora both encloses the newborn infant in the envelope formed by the mother's voice, warmth, and gestures.

The chora is this stage, a language before language.

Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Chora (2)By relegating the mother to the interior of the chora/womb, Julia Kristeva reduces her to silence.

The split nature of motherhood: the mother-as-genetrix vs. the mother-as-speaking-subject.

The mother cannot simultaneously be and inhabit the chora, at least not once childbirth has taken place.

To fuse the daughter with the mother, and the mother with her own mother.

Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Chora (3)Robert Altman's Three WomenMilly - prototypical mother,mother-as-speaking-subject.Willy - prototypical mother, absorbed in her pregnancy, silent.Pinky - prototypical daughter, a desire to fuse with the mother.

Three women are united in the act of childbirth.

Video clip (1:56) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpca6eTJc3g

Disembodying the female voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist CinemaFemale voice : female body

Irigaray: Language adequate for the female body

"woman" has an extradiscursive reality, comes into existence without any cultural interference or mediating representation

Irigaray: Without any interference or special manipulation, you are a woman already. How can I say it? That we are women from the start. That we don't have to be turned into women by them, labeled by them, made holy and profaned by them

Silverman: Although meaning inhabits one order, and the biological body another, the former mediates and indeed determines our relation to the latter

The body wears the stamp of cultureNo possibility of ever recovering an "authentic" female body

Lacan: I am looked at, I am a picture. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that isoutside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which I am photo-graphed.

Male Voice Female VoicePower and authorityMale speech in outer spaces rather than the inner space of the story

Excluded from the position of discursive powerConfined not only to the safe place of the story, but to safe places within the story Womans speech synchronized with the image

Directors: Bette Gordon (Empty Suitcases), Patricia Gruben, (Sifted Evidence), Yvonne Rainer (Journeys from Berlin/71, Film about A Woman Who ) and Sally Potter (The Gold Diggers)

Experimenting with voices

Rainer: the extreme prolongation of certain soundless images

Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)Emotional Accretion in 48 stepsfile:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/XP/My%20Documents/Downloads/kristina.jpgShe arrives home. She is very angry. She knows the crucial moment was when she said "hold me." Somehow she had betrayed herself. She hadn't wanted to be held. (Do you think she could figure her way out of a paper bag?) She had wanted to bash his fucking face in

The Female Authorial Voice (1)Authorial Voice - the voices or speakers used by authors when they seemingly speak for themselves in a book The authorial voice is rarely heard as a woman's voice in classical cinema, but when it is, it can illustrate some key points about the differences between women's and men's voices in film.

The Female Authorial Voice (2)Filmmaker can be said to function as one of the enunciators of the works that bear his or her name, those works will contain certain sounds, images, characterological motifs, narrative patterns, and/or formal configurations which provide the cinematic equivalent of the linguistic markers through which subjectivity is activated.

Filmmaker speaks him or herself as the point of absolute textual origin (e.g. Hitchcocks film Marnie)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZTBtq8W9JQ

WHO is speaking?In his tale Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence:

She was Woman, with her sudden fears, her inexplicable whims, her instinctive fears, her meaningless bravado, her defiance, and her delicious delicacy of feeling.Is it the hero of the tale, who would prefer not to recognize the castrato hidden beneath the "woman"?Is it Balzac the man, whose personal experience has provided him with a philosophy of Woman?Is it Balzac the author, professing certain "literary" ideas about femininity?Is it universal wisdom? Romantic philosophy?

The Author inside/outside the textRoland Barthes - readers must separate a literary work from its creator;Andrew Sarris - the director's personality is "imbedded in the stuff of the cinema and cannot be rendered;Peter Wollen - the author "outside" the text thus becomes a kind of projection of the author ''inside" the text;Raymond Bellour - The author "outside" the text is thus both a projection of the author "inside" the text and the point from which desire flows.

Female Authorial Voice (3)Most Hollywood films forecloses upon the female voice;

Female authorial voice makes itself heard only through disruptions and dislocations within the textual economy of classic cinema;

Claire Johnston emphasizes the importance of the auteur theory for feminism;

Few Hollywood films carry a female directorial signature;

Example (1)Lea Jacobsons reauthorship of Rappers film Now,Voyayerhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8kV7ufEHOI (from 24:24 sec) the female protagonist "takes the enunciating position with respect to herself through an identification with a man," and so becomes "a self-sufficient sexual and discursive configuration"

Example (2) - Cavanis cinemaAny of her films is said to be about women;Characters who inhabit her films virtually invite feminist analysis:Antigone in The Cannibals, Lou-Andreas Salome in Beyond Good and Evil, a female concentration camp inmate in The Night Porter, a Japanese/German lesbian couple in The Berlin Affair; the fatal lure of the position for her male characters;

all occupy subject-positions which are more classically feminine than masculine subject- positions demanding of them passivity, suffering and renunciation;Seem to be fueled by the dream of androgyny.

Thank you for your attention!