Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction

• Published in: Discourse (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 279 - 291
• Main Author: Rangan, Pooja
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Detroit Wayne State University Press 01.10.2017
• Subjects: Aesthetic Education; Aesthetics; Audio editing; Auditory Discrimination; Authenticity; Authorial voice; Conventions; Data visualization; Deleuze, Gilles; Documentaries; Documentary films; Ears & hearing; Essays; Ethnography; Fate; Fiction; Figurative Language; Ideology; Intersectionality; Listening; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literary Genres; Literary translation; Meaning; Metaphor; Metaphysics; Motion pictures; Music; Musical register; Narration; Narrative structure; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Penumbra; Politics; Sound; Speaking; Voice overs; Voiced sounds; New York; Canada; United States > US
• DOI: 10.13110/discourse.39.3.0279
• ISSN: 1522-5321

This special issue emerged from our dissatisfaction with the widespread but underinterrogated embrace of voice as a metaphor for a documentary film's textual means of signification-as well as our desire to take up Trinh's more literal emphasis on what happens to speaking voices in documentary-while acknowledging that neither avenue can adequately address the enigmatic place of voice in documentary. Over the last three decades, scholars writing about documentary conventions and approaches as wide ranging as classical vocal narration to interviews and wordless essay films to soundtrack design in nature documentaries have adopted Nichols's metaphor, while practitioners have engaged it to theorize their own authorial address. Many of them hasten to add, invoking Nichols, that "'voice' is not restricted to any one code or feature such as dialogue or spoken commentary. Voice is perhaps akin to that intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film's codes, and it applies to all modes of documentary." In comparison, few have acknowledged the complexity of voice in this metaphor, which stands simultaneously for a documentary film's perspective, mode of address, and textual organization, even as it invokes the varied narrative possibilities and political stakes of representing actual speaking subjects. As Marit Corneil observes, a range of ontological, rhetorical, and political meanings are condensed into this slippery signifie