Dorothy Arzner's Talkies: Gender, Technologies of Voice, and the Modernist Sensorium
TL;DR: Arzner as mentioned in this paper explores the possibility of an embodied modernist voice that is at once reflexive about technologies of mass culture and attentive to women's social and aesthetic concerns in her films.
Abstract: ln Close Up , Dorothy Richardson and H. D. pose sound film as male because they constrain women’s aesthetic engagement as film spectators, a position that anticipates later feminist film criticism on embodied voice in classical cinema. This essay uncovers how Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director of Hollywood sound film from 1928 to 1943, embeds responses to these critiques through what she calls “unusual moments” in her films. In such moments, Arzner explores the possibility of an embodied modernist voice that is at once reflexive about technologies of mass culture and attentive to women’s social and aesthetic concerns.
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21 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore transatlantic modernist literature's methods of representing the material female mind and body in light of photographic and cinematic composition and analysis, and discover the potential of modernist narratives to engage the compositional methods and subjects of photography and film in the expression of otherwise unsanctioned, unseen, and unspoken female identity.
Abstract: This dissertation explores transatlantic modernist literature’s methods of representing the material female mind and body in light of photographic and cinematic composition and analysis. The ongoing and often concurrent transatlantic development of photographic and cinematic technology invites a broad historical trajectory: from stop-motion photography to cinematography to the transition from silent to sound film. As photography and film manipulate time and space by halting and resuming perpetual motion, so my investigation crosses time and space, freezing provocative moments and posing enlightening encounters. Through interdisciplinary associations, I aim to reframe and reanimate our critical perception of the multiplicitous modernist scene. Each chapter thus views literary works from the primary era of cinematic development, the 1920s and ’30s, through the proverbial lens of visual media works or analyses, such as stop-motion photograph series or feminist film theories. Rather than attributing a literary method to a media technique, or vice versa, I investigate their various intersections and deviations, their various possibilities and limitations. These explorations ultimately discover the potential of modernist narratives to engage the compositional methods and subjects of photography and film in the expression of otherwise unsanctioned, unseen, and unspoken female identity. INDEX WORDS: Modernist novel, Feminist film theory, Narrative voice, Female embodiment, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston COMPOSING WOMEN: INTERSECTIONS OF TRANSATLANTIC MODERNIST LITERATURE AND VISUAL MEDIA
12 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932.
Abstract: This article explores the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932. Through an analysis of the politics, economy, and memory of Yusuf Wahbi's film Awlad al-Dhawat (Sons of the Aristocrats), it shows how the interplay between new sound technologies, the global film trade, and nationalist and racialized narratives of gender and resistance shaped the contours of ideal femininity and masculinity during the interwar period in Egypt. The article also shows how the film's representations formed at the intersection between the filmmakers’ attempts to challenge colonial stereotyping and their efforts to capture an ever-expanding global film market. Often neglected in cinema scholarship, early filmmaking in Egypt, I argue, is critical to understanding wider processes of nation formation and gendered characterizations.
8 citations
DOI•
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, a long history of talking heads and statues to publicly displayed robots and fortune-tellers, as well as consumer-oriented products such as the late 19th-century talking dolls of Thomas Edison are discussed.
Abstract: Voice is a powerful tool of agency – for humans and non-humans alike. In this article, we go through the long history of talking heads and statues to publicly displayed robots and fortune-tellers, as well as consumer-oriented products such as the late 19thcentury talking dolls of Thomas Edison. We also analyse the attempts at making speaking machines commercially successful on various occasions. In the end, we investigate how speech producing devices such as the actual digital assistants that operate our current technological systems fit into this historical context. Our focus is on the gender aspects of the artificial, posthuman voice. On the basis of our study, we conclude that the female voice and other feminine characteristics as well as the figures of exoticized and racialized ‘Others’ have been applied to draw attention away from the uncanniness and other negative effects of these artificial humans and the machinic speech they produce. Technical problems associated with the commercialization of technologically produced speech have been considerable, but cultural issues have played an equally important role.
8 citations
References
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03 Feb 2006
TL;DR: In A Voice and Nothing More as discussed by the authors, Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a).
Abstract: Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work. The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels -- the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice -- and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.
760 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1990
TL;DR: In this paper, the mother's mouth and language channels were used as a metaphor for the great Lalula and Rebus, respectively, and the toast was used to describe the sacrifice of the Queen's sacrifice.
Abstract: Foreword Part I. 1800: 1. The mother's mouth 2. language channels 3. The toast Part II. 1900: 4. The great Lalula 5. Rebus 6. Queen's sacrifice Afterword to the second printing Notes Index of persons.
627 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1988
TL;DR: In this article, the female authorial voice is disembodied by Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity, and the female subjectivity and the negative Oedipus complex.
Abstract: Acknowledgements Preface [1] Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue [2] Body Talk [3] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation [4] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female Subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex [5] Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity [6] The Female Authorial Voice Notes Index
438 citations
Book•
[...]
15 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this paper, Mabuse and Tamaki describe the Silences of Mabuse: Magic and Powers of Acousmetre, the I-Voice, the Silent Connection, the Screaming Point, the Master of Voices, the Siren's Song, the Mute Character's Final Words, and the Confession.
Abstract: I. Mabuse: Magic and Powers of Acousmetre1. The Acousmetre2. The Silences of Mabuse3. The I-VoiceII. Tamaki: Tales of the Voice4. The Voice Connection5. The Screaming Point6. The Master of Voices7. The Mute Character's Final Words8. The Siren's SongIII. Norman Or The Impossible Anacousmetre9. The Voice that Seeks a Body10. The ConfessionEpilogue: Cinema's Voices of the 80's and 90's
370 citations
TL;DR: The Enlarged Edition of The World Viewed Notes as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays about the world view of film and its relationships with other media. But it is not a complete collection of all the works mentioned in this article.
Abstract: Foreword to the Enlarged Edition Preface 1. An Autobiography of Companions 2. Sights and Sounds 3. Photograph and Screen 4. Audience, Actor, and Star 5. Types Cycles as Genres 6. Ideas of Origin 7. Baudelaire and the Myths of Film 8. The Military Man and the Woman 9. The Dandy 10. End of the Myths 11. The Medium and Media of Film 12. The World as Mortal: Absolute Age and Youth 13. The World as a Whole: Color 14. Automatism 15. Excursus: Some Modernist Painting 16. Exhibition and Self-Reference 17. The Camera's Implication 18. Assertions in Techniques 19. The Acknowledgment of Silence More of The World Viewed Notes Index
355 citations