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Nº 3 WORDS AS IMAGES, THE VOICE-OVER

Editorial
Manuel Garin

DOCUMENTS

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Jonas Mekas

The Word Is Image
Manoel de Oliveira

Back to voice: on voices over, in, out, through
Serge Daney

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION. INTERVIEWS

Interview with Pierre Léon. A Rhetorical Discussion of the Voice-over and Considerations Regarding the Actor's Voice as Filmic Material

ABSTRACT

This conversation attempts to address the question of the voice-over through various circular journeys. It begins with a consideration of the sense in which this resource could be deemed something essentially novelesque, something that began as a natural phenomenon in classic cinema and that today has ended up turning into a deliberate and conscious search. It then moves onto a reflection on the filmmakers who have made fundamental changes to cinematic narration using the voice-over. The work of Pierre Léon as a filmmaker, actor and even a sound engineer on some films also allows a technical approach to the work of recording the actor's voice as filmic material.

Fernando Ganzo

Sounds with Open Eyes (or Keep Describing so that I Can See Better). Interview to Rita Azevedo Gomes

ABSTRACT

In this conversation, Rita Azevedo Gomes –filmmaker and film programmer at Cinemateca Portuguesa– analyzes from her own practice and experience as a spectator the relationship between the voice-over and the image, following Manoel de Oliveira’s idea that the word is an image, and that sound should open the eyes or encourage vision, which is exemplified in Branca de neve (João César Monteiro, 2000). The filmmaker, then, focuses on her films A Vingança de uma Mulher (Rita Azevedo, 2012) and Frágil Como o Mundo (Rita Azevedo, 2002) to explain, with different examples, the use of the poetic word or the creation process of a soundtrack. Later, Rita Azevedo approaches the work of the sound technician, filmmaker and colleague Joaquim Pinto and, finally, the relationship between Manoel de Oliveira and João Bénard da Costa from the documentary that she directed about them, A 15ª Pedra (Rita Azevedo, 2007).

Álvaro Arroba

ARTICLES

Further Remarks on Showing and Telling

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the endurance of popular prescriptions that stories should “show, don’t tell”. It traces this dogma back to early 20th century literary theorists. Then the essay untangles the presuppositions that underlie this axiom, and refutes them, especially as pertains to the use of voice-over narration in the cinema.

Sarah Kozloff

Ars poetica. The Filmmaker's Voice

ABSTRACT

The first part of the article compares the political cinema of Vertov, Godard and Marker, through a critique of the ideological power that sound and the word have had on the image. It goes on to suggest a series of associations between films in which the filmmaker’s voice (Mekas, Cocteau, Van der Keuken, Rouch, etc) is linked to the act of creating, the uncertainty of the process, the essay that is akin to the sketch or retrospective meditations and writings in the first person. Through the essayistic voice it develops the possibility of analysing what was invisible or went unnoticed through editing, criticism through revision: the filmmaker can emerge from himself, objectivise himself by looking at what the material reveals to him about his own ideology or psychology inscribed unconsciously onto the film, or by examining the process itself. Unlike written analysis, this essayistic conception of the relationship between word and image shares the movement from the material of cinema to the very idea behind it.

Gonzalo de Lucas

Voices at the Altar of Mourning: Challenges, Affliction

ABSTRACT

The advent of sound, in addition to identifying cinema’s first loss –the silent film– entailed the emergence of the voice, whose disjunctive and contrapuntal possibilities in relation to the flow of images would not take long to be buried in favour of a synchronous cinema and the convention of shot/reverse shot as the perfected visual translation of dialogue exchange (voices embodied by the physical presence of the stars). The split between two tracks has nevertheless been exploited by some of the most important filmmakers throughout film history, who saw in the combat between words and images a way of being faithful, in a different sense, to cinema’s main mission: to make the invisible visible through the observable. Thus, filmmakers like Straub/Huillet, Duras, Lanzmann, Eustache and Friedl chose to work on presenting the word cast into the air as a penetrating source of images of the real; images that conceal occurrences that the off-camera voices or voice-overs attract and draw to the surface. This violent and optimistic type of cinema is what Jean Narboni associated with a thankless yet joyful task in contrast with the makers of necrophiliac cinema like Resnais. This division of positions in relation to the melancholy of the sound era can be explored to analyse various cases of the use of the voice-over as a fiction stimulator in contemporary cinema. Under the influence of Straubian pedagogy, the films of Rousseau, Fitoussi or Rey could be cited. Within the spectral group, with their passion for spectres but also for the survival of memory in a fantastic style are contemporary Portuguese filmmakers like Miguel Gomes, João Pedro Rodrigues and Rita Azevedo Gomes. Half way between these two groups, reaping post-modern rewards from both ethical-aesthetic approaches, we could locate the films of Ben Rivers.

Alfonso Crespo

Siren Song: the Narrating Voice in Two Films by Raúl Ruiz

ABSTRACT

In two documentary-inflected fiction films, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (L’Hypothèse du tableau volé, 1979) and the less known short, Ice Stories (Histoires de glace, 1987), Raúl Ruiz employs oral narration, both on screen and in voice-over, to lead the viewer into labyrinthine narratives that recall in their baroque complexity the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. While Borges grounds his stories in the real world through referencing historical times, people and places, and often uses an academic style and form to bestow an air of seriousness and rigour to his conceptual flights of fancy, Ruiz counterpoints the fantastic nature of his stories with documentary devices and images. Combined with articulate and persuasive oral narration, Ruiz creates a unique and mysterious world that marries the real with the fantastic to unsettling effect. This paper explores how Ruiz uses specifically cinematic approaches, such as unusual voice-image juxtapositions and multiple oral narrators to challenge, like Borges before him, accepted notions of time, causality and identity, and how he incorporates other art forms, such as paintings, photographs and the tableau vivant, to interrogate the boundaries of filmic form and style.

David Heinemann

REVIEWS

Gertrud Koch. Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema
Gerard Casau

Sergi Sánchez. Hacia una imagen no-tiempo. Deleuze y el cine contemporáneo
Shaila García-Catalán

Antonio Somaini. Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio
Alan Salvadó

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS Nº 15

Deadline for submissions: [EXTENDED] January 30th, 2020.

More information HERE.

 

ONLINE DOCUMENTS

matweb ccc07

ONLINE DOCUMENTS No. 7

Notes on the Media Crisis
Peter Watkins

matweb ccc03

ONLINE DOCUMENTS No. 5

The Screenings: Watching Creation from Nearby
Cinema en curs

The Creation Process
Cinema en curs

matweb ccc03

ONLINE DOCUMENTS No. 4

Catallegory fatigue
Miguel Amorim