The voice is elusive. Once you've eliminated everything that is not the voice itself—the body houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that color it, what’s left? — Michel Chion
Sound if often heard but not seen. And I’m not talking about seeing the source of that sound, but to see the sound waves, the vibratory patterns—to put sound in the spotlight as material form and it being physically present as part of the world that’s being shown in the frame. We tend to always relate a voice with body just as we relate a sound effect with an object. But, what happens when we separate the voice from the original source and give it to another body or object? My focus is not going to be on how sound makes itself visible when we analyze its physics, my focus is going to be on the marriage of the voice with another body. How the detachment of body and voice and the synchronization of the latter with something that’s not the original source could be taken out as a critique or praise to the narrative.
I’d like to look at the purpose of this newly created relationship, why the artist or director took that approach, and what it’s saying about the original source or body of this voice. A voice-over, narration or acousmatic element can be the most important part of an art piece, creating both a physical and emotional atmosphere that without it, we wouldn’t have anything at all. I’d like to see voice as a type of creator that is vital to the understanding of the pieces, unlike other sound films, where we can take off the soundtrack and although it’s going to make a big difference, the film could still be understood. I will look at three very different pieces: One Million Kingdoms (2001) by Pierre Huyghe which was exhibited at the Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art exhibition at The Whitney Museum, Vocal Flame (2012) by Aura Satz, and Illusions (1982) by Julie Dash. In all of the three pieces, we’re able to see how the voice manifests physically in other bodies or abstract figures/textures, manipulating what we see in a metaphoric, and even in some cases, physical ways.
For One Million Kingdoms, the French artist Pierre Huyghe made a short video installation of a manga character named Annlee, that’s seen walking in this unknown place. As the character walks around, the world around her forms every time we hear this acousmêtre. The voice-over narration manifests itself physically in the dust pillars of Annlee’s world, going up every time the narration starts. The voice that we’re hearing is a digitally synthesized form of Neil Armstrong’s voice speaking about the Apollo 11 mission, and reading an excerpt of Jule Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”. Later on, we get close-ups of Annlee’s face that demonstrate de-acousmatization; we can suddenly see that the character is speaking. This voice is not only making the dust pillars or spikes that make the world that surrounds this character but it’s also making this entity its true body. This could be jarring for the audience since this entity wasn’t created to match this voice, but it is now known that this character is speaking about herself and creating her own world as she does so. Because it’s a computer animated art piece, we’re not really seeing the sound waves traveling through air, we’re only seeing a digital depiction, a 3-dimensional spectrogram representation of the sound waves Annlee is emitting as she speaks.
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One Million Kingdoms (2001)
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In Aura Satz’s sonic sculpture titled Vocal Flame we see a slightly different approach when it comes to sound manipulating what we see. In Vocal Flame, Aura Satz utilizes a Ruben’s tube to depict sound waves and how these change every time the woman emits sounds with her mouth. An actress performs multiple voices that are famous in pop culture, each of them differently, making the flames mold to the phrases accordingly. When she’s not speaking, we can see a clear representation of a standing wave with its compressions and rarefactions. Once she starts speaking we can see how this wave starts getting manipulated by the voice-over. Unlike in One Million Kingdoms, this voice is never given a body. It has no source (that we see of course), this being hidden behind a curtain or veil—we see the visualization of voice in the flames emerging from the Ruben’s tube.
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Vocal Flame (2012)
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Finally, I chose this last example because it’s the only one out of the three where you can see the “original” source. Now, I put original in quotation marks because, in the narrative, it’s the source, but production wise it’s neither women’s real voices. Illusions directed by Julie Dash, tells the story of a biracial woman named Mignon living and working in Hollywood that is easily passing as white during a period of time where there wasn’t enough African-American representation in the film industry and there was still a lot of discrimination. While working in the studio, Mignon meets an African-American girl named Esther that has been hired to work for the studio so she can sing the parts of a film that has a white protagonist, meaning that her voice is going to be dubbed to another woman, given that she was black so she couldn’t star in the film herself; she was lending her talent or singing voice to another body. The detachment of voice and body in this short film is very literal. Production-wise, this was neither woman’s voice; it was Ella Fitzgerald’s. But for the purpose of the paper, I’m going to stick with the film itself and what this could say about the politics behind it; how Julie Dash’s approach on voice affects the entire story.
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Illusions (1982)
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For each of the three examples, the detachment of voice and body is attacked differently, yet they’re also very much alike. I chose these examples in particular because for research purposes, I was interested in working with three distinct types of cinema: animation, live action, and experimental.
Aesthetics and Meaning
We deal with women’s voices in both Illusion and Vocal Flame. In Aura Satz’s work, in particular, the woman’s “embodiments of ventriloquized voices” are very powerful and strong. In contrast to how women’s voices—women in general—tend to be portrayed: soft, gentle and weak, sometimes not even in the center of the frame. In “A Voice and Nothing More” by Mladen Dolar he writes about the way aesthetics can affect the meaning or effect a voice has on the listener. If you concentrate solely on how the voice sounds and the beauty of it, it will lose true meaning, becoming a fetish object.
I will try to argue that apart from those widespread uses of the voice—the voice as the vehicle of meaning; the voice as the source of aesthetic admiration—there is a third level: an object voice which does not go up in smoke in the conveyance of meaning, and does not solidify an object of fetish reverence, but an object which functions as a blind spot in the call as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation. (Dolar, 06)
Although Dolar explains that the aesthetics of the voice can trick a person into not truly understanding it, he also makes reference to the voice that doesn’t have meaning at all; a voice that it’s there for its beauty. In Illusions, Esther Jeeter is cast for the beauty of her voice. The studio has no interest whatsoever in what it means to be an African-American in the film industry, they just want to be done with the production and have their main protagonist sound its best while charming the audience. As Esther exclaims: “At least they’re giving us a chance!” For Esther, her voice is the most important thing because it’s the vehicle to being a professional performer, even if it’s behind a curtain. Her voice is the voice of many African-American performers that had to dub white actresses and actors around the 1940s-50s because they themselves weren’t wanted or looked for in the show business. To Hollywood, Esther’s voice is merely usable for its beauty and aesthetics but with a purpose (i.e. a successful and profitable product). Therefore, a spectator could view Esther’s voice as that blind spot between the conveyance of meaning and aesthetic appreciation. On the other hand, Vocal Flame wouldn’t be looked at primarily as a vehicle for meaning. Aura Satz explores the molding and performance of these famous voices by looking at the relationship between sound and image. How does this sound in relationship to what we see? She uses the Ruben's tube as a mode of materializing sound vibrations as I mentioned before. I decided to go a little further to understand why she chose those specific voices and what is the relationship with their respective bodies. Perhaps Vocal Flame and the characters whose phrases the woman performs mean more than a beautiful sound sculpture. One has to go to the sources of those voices and shift perspectives. How does having the original source present affects legitimacy? Or how can a voice have multiple sources if the voice is language and this is separate from dialogue?
Ventriloquism
"Sound technology creates a fissure between sound and body that begins in the silent era and continues into the digital age.” - Pamela Robertson Wojcik
When the performer embodies the voices without her being seen, it demonstrates some sort of ventriloquism. In an interview for Studio International Aura Satz commented on her interest in ventriloquism and why she chose to do those specific phrases that we hear in her spoken-word piece. She explained that the characters in those movies were sort of puppets to other voices—they were dubbed in the original films— hence the reference to ventriloquism. Both The Exorcist and Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice were dubbed over, whilst the phrase in My Fair Lady was seen as a “molding on the voice in terms of narrative”. According to Satz, this all relates to gender and how women’s voices are appropriated or misused. All three films in this paper practice a ventriloquism of some sort (especially in One Million Kingdoms where you can see a 3-dimensional animated character that literally resembles a puppet).
In “Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppet”, Helen Davies makes an interesting point about ventriloquism and women: “Having the voice suppressed or appropriated by external forces [,] repeatedly manifests as a feminized condition” (22). Although Davies is mainly referring to Victorian men and woman, one can apply this to Vocal Flame by looking at how the original sources or bodies in those films that she performed got their voices taken away. The voice being a very powerful weapon in a woman is silenced not only by men but also by women themselves. Aura Satz’s work perfectly portrays empowerment in women’s voice. We hear and see it, the force of this voice manifesting itself in the flame. Davies also argues that a person can often hold the position of the ventriloquist and the ventriloquized. In the piece, the performer could be simultaneously holding both positions. But given that there are no bodies present—no source seen—it’s hard to do so since the only visual trace of this voice is what we see in the flames. In Vocal Flame the filmmaker accomplishes giving back those voices to the women from those famous films that were silenced once or used as puppets. This is an example of how having the body present could make a difference in how we perceive meaning in a film or how we deal with our initial reaction. Without this voice and just the flames, the piece would be very hard to understand. The detachment of body and voice and the embodiment of the ventriloquized voices can serve as praise or as a critique to the piece. Just like in Illusions, Esther Jeeter’s voice is an object of meaning given to a performance “puppet”, which is seen as a critique to the Hollywood system and its racial discrimination. In Vocal Flame, it does the opposite; it embraces these voices and gives them autonomy. She brings them back to life through the flames.
Voice and Presence
Does the voice essentially relate to presence after symbolic has done away with all its positive features? Is pure presence, then, the remaining residue? Does the object voice, as the necessary implication of the structural intervention, run into the notorious “metaphysics of presence” as its most recent and most insidious variation? (Dolar, 37)
Voice has an effect in its surroundings. Sometimes, removing the voice or even the entire soundtrack can change the piece or how we perceive it. Mladen Dolar argues that voice can sometimes create a presence or a background. That just by hearing the voice, we’re able to identify certain characteristics of where this voice is or who’s it from. Not only because of its phonological traces but also by looking deeper into the object voice but how it sounds. In One Million Kingdoms, a person might be able to identify, create a space, and make up similar visuals to that of the video simply be hearing the recording of the voice. This connection of voice and space is what he calls “the illusion”, to “understand points to the direct link between hearing the voice and the origin of conceptuality” (Dolar, 39).
Pierre Huyghe plays with Annlee’s voice by having it manifest in the space. As we hear the recording, we’re creating this “shifting lunar topography” in our heads just like the character does whenever we see the spikes emerging from the ground, the artist intended Annlee to be the author of her own story. We are even face to face with the entity at one point and he directs his speech towards us. This creates a line between the viewer being this character and owning their voice and them being our guide; an acousmêtre whom we later get introduced to. Annlee is a piece that’s very much opened to interpretation. The artist uses voice to portray a space of creative expression. On page 5 of “Analyzing Performance and Meaning in Film”, Cynthia Baron and Diane Carson comment on how “accent, intonation, and the unique timbre and materiality that belong to a particular voice…” are crucial to a successful sound and image relationship. I want to oppose to this since I have touched several points in terms of body and voice where we witness a successful use of the two. While the dubbing of Neil Armstrong’s voice on a teenage girl might be jarring to a viewer, the connection of the two is not erroneous; it’s different. When I say different, I really mean political, or as Mladen Dollar would call it “the medium of democratization of justice” (109).
To conclude, artists and filmmakers utilize the voice as a vehicle to prove a point. Even if it falls under aesthetic appreciation characteristic, there will always be a blind spot category where this could fall. In Illusions, the voice is used to make a political statement. The detachment of Esther’s voice and the synchronization of this one with another body are symbolizing the actual treatment African-Americans were getting during that period of time in Los Angeles. This is a direct critique to the narrative. In One Million Kingdoms, although it’s open for interpretation and focused on aesthetic beauty, Annlee is the creator of her own world, just like we are able to create or manipulate or own environment at times. Lastly, in Vocal Flame, the detachment of voice and body is used to embrace and to celebrate women’s voice: voices that have been given to other bodies or “puppets”. Having the original source of the body may not always be necessary when it comes to film since it all depends on how you’re playing the voice, where you want to take it, and what you want to achieve with it. In Aura Satz’s work, I found the need to go deeper into the art to fully understand the object voice, whereas, in the other two examples like One Million Kingdoms, a person is able to speculate. Still the “why?” and “how?” are not answered. After researching and analyzing certain characteristics of the relationship between voice and body I was able to conclude that the voice is a very important aspect of film. Not the necessarily the dialogue, but the language that’s being communicated to us and how it’s represented since we live in a world where we’re constantly communicating and being communicated at.
Sources:
Dolar, Mladen. A voice and nothing more. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print.
McNay, Anna. "Aura Satz: 'I think of all my works as conversations', Studio International." Studio International - Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2016.
"One Million Kingdoms." Guggenheim. N.p., 2016. Web. 16 Dec. 2016.
Davies, Helen. Gender and ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-victorian fiction: passionate puppets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Henderson, Brian, Ann Martin, and Lee Amazonas. Film quarterly: forty years, a selection. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1999. Print.
Chion, Michel, and Claudia Gorbman. The voice in cinema. New York: Columbia U Press, 1999. Print.
Baron, Cynthia, and Diane Carson. Analyzing Performance and Meaning in Film. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Print.