{"title":"Listening to Soundscapes in Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975)","authors":"Brooke Mccorkle","doi":"10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.14","url":null,"abstract":"In his overview of Kurosawa Akira’s works, preeminent scholar of Japanese culture and film, Donald Richie, harshly evaluates the director’s 1975 film Dersu Uzala. Citing an increased emphasis on style over “a dynamic sense of character,” Richie argues that “Kurosawa has produced for the first time in his long and outstanding career a rather lifeless film.” Yet what is missed in Richie’s otherwise well-thought-out critique is Kurosawa’s increased concerns about the depictions of environments natural and urban through the film’s sound design. Produced in the early 1970s in the wake of serious environmental problems that plagued Japan’s rapid postwar recovery, the problematic relationship between humans and nature would have figured heavily in the minds of Kurosawa and his audience. In other words, listening to the meticulously crafted soundscapes of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala allows scholars to reevaluate its importance within Kurosawa’s career and Japanese history more generally.","PeriodicalId":193833,"journal":{"name":"Voicing the Cinema","volume":"244 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124243120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Apprehending Human Voice in the “Silent Cinema”","authors":"Julie Brown","doi":"10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.5","url":null,"abstract":"In the silent cinema there was no soundtrack, nor indeed sonic accompaniment that was consistently applied to particular moving pictures in their various exhibition spaces. Least of all was there an established sound hierarchy in which “voice” occupied a particular place—central or otherwise. Rather, “silent cinema” was initially dominated by the notion of moving pictures as “attractions,” though, over its thirty years, it allowed for diverse representations of voice and vocality courtesy of a variety of cinematic systems, which might or might not have involved the creation of actual sound. This chapter outlines the many manifestations of cinematic “voice” in the silent cinema: onscreen speaking to which the audience is deaf, but which Isabelle Raynaud notes emanates from a screen world that is “hearing”; intertitles; bodily gesture; typed words on the screen; live voices in the theater variously describing the moving pictures, reading out title cards, lip synching dialogue or song, and so forth. The author draws on Brian Kane’s recent reconceptualization of “voice” as Phoné to theorize voice in the silent cinema in a way that moves beyond notions of vocal silence and audience deafness. For Kane, voice as Phoné “is distinct from three other terms with which it is often described”: echos, topos, and logos—roughly speaking, sound, site, and meaning. What Michel Chion describes as “elastic speech,” but which we can expand to silent cinema “voice,” might therefore be better conceptualized as a series of techniques necessitating a constant movement between different manifestations of echos, topos, and logos, created via various technologies or techniques (techê). Because echos is sometimes entirely absent in the silent cinema, the author argues that “apprehension” is more apt than “listening” as a description of how silent cinema’s representational systems for voice become intelligible to the viewer.","PeriodicalId":193833,"journal":{"name":"Voicing the Cinema","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130432435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Breaking into Soundtrack in 1980s Teen Films","authors":"Cari McDonnell","doi":"10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvz0hcn6.10","url":null,"abstract":"From Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear in Risky Business (1983) to John Cusack blasting a love song on his boombox below his girlfriend’s bedroom window in Say Anything . . . (1989), characters “breaking into soundtrack” are some of the most iconic moments in teen films of the 1980s. This essay examines these sequences as a discrete mode of musical performance with aesthetic conventions and narrative functions that are largely consistent throughout the decade. The author argues that teen characters tend to break into soundtrack at strategic moments in the narrative in order to try out potential identities and to express strong, often subversive feelings without negative consequences. These performances allow teens to test the waters without committing to a course of action. That the music is all commercially available popular music only highlights the fact that these are appropriated, rather than spontaneous, songs that can be tried on like a new outfit. Thus, in these films, teens break into soundtrack in order to try out different voices as they search to find their own.","PeriodicalId":193833,"journal":{"name":"Voicing the Cinema","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124086306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voicing the CinemaPub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043000.003.0014
J. Staiger
{"title":"Sound and the Comic/Horror Romance Film","authors":"J. Staiger","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043000.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043000.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Media scholars (and audiences) routinely make useful comparative analyses of films and television series. The problems of grouping texts are well known. This essay proposes a multidimensional approach to this critical activity, one that focuses on formulas, affects, and inflections. Narrative formulas and affects propel our sense of a genre; however, inflections such as stars, target audiences, locales, time periods, verisimilitude, taste markers, or performance styles can radically twist the base into something more complicated. One of the most important sorts of inflections is use of sound: aural effects, voice, and music. Such a multidimensional approach to grouping texts helps to resolve many anomalies in genre categorizing: for instance, the generic category of the musical. Scholars have tended to describe the musical based on Hollywood films created between 1930 and 1960. During this period, most musicals use a standard romance formula and vary the space and time to form several common “subgenres.” The author argues that, from the 1960s, artists begin to turn to other narrative formulas such as the male quest story (Tommy), horror (Sweeney Todd), the fallen-man melodrama (All That Jazz, Pennies from Heaven), and the bio pix (Hamilton). What the musical “is” is inflecting a narrative formula with a particular musical treatment—bursting into song or dance not necessarily provoked by a reasonably motivated diegetic event such as a nightclub act. Such an inflection of musical treatment could be applied to any narrative formula and has been. This essay explores this argument focusing on the comic/horror romance film Zombieland (2009) but with other examples to illustrate the viability of the critical approach and the functions of sound.","PeriodicalId":193833,"journal":{"name":"Voicing the Cinema","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121465846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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