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EDITORIAL. WORDS AS IMAGES, THE VOICE-OVER

Manuel Garin

In the climax of Nostromo, when we eagerly await the resolution of the novel’s great enigmas (a war, the protagonist’s disappearance, the destiny of several characters), Joseph Conrad introduces a radical ellipsis, refusing to describe the central images that –until then– he has carefully carved in the reader’s mind. We’re talking about powerful images, since the book’s Second Part –which precedes the ellipsis– conveys an unremitting flow of adventures, narrated in an overwhelmingly visual way. The reader craves to see new images at all costs, and Conrad thwarts such desire by transforming present-tense narration into a retrospective tale: the voice of an old seaman –captain Mitchell– who tells what happened in hindsight, years later, while he acts as cicerone for a random newcomer. Filtered through his voice, those images –that we so intensely longed for– become a sort of touristy print the legend, completely opposed to our expectations, thus boycotting both the images themselves (their historical interpretation) and the reader’s desire “for images”. A double-boycott that forces us to see through the voice:

“And in the superintendent’s private room the privileged passenger by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was ‘in this very harbor’ an…” (Conrad, 2007: 349)

Conrad’s elliptic treason is not only a temporal displacement, that is to say, a prime political gesture, it is also a manifest on the power of the voice and, particularly, of those voices-over that seem to come from another world and challenge –with just a few words– all our assumptions about what cinema is or is not. Voice-over, understood as a way of generating images and as an act of resistance (to images), constitutes the main topic of this Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema issue, for which we have gathered a chorus of heterogeneous and sharp voices, combining interviews and essays with work-in-progress documents by filmmakers, editors and sound designers, in order to juxtapose different uses of oral narration as a key resource for cinematic creation.  

Looked down by some, mystified by others, voice-over is one of the most underrated assets throughout film history, one that has provoked many misunderstandings… a fact that already proves its usefulness for experimentation and critique. We are currently facing a period of changes and cost-reductions due to digital modes of production, and films like Historias Extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008) or Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012) are starting to shape new ways of relating images and words, through cinematic and literary devices. A new voice-over tradition is being developed through those films, and that is precisely why this issue discusses certain concepts and historical assumptions linked with different genres, periods, countries and filmmakers.

These pages do not attempt to solve anything, but to gather an ensemble of voices that question –like captain Mitchell’s– the links between seeing and telling: words as images.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONRAD, Joseph (2007). Nostromo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.