Affective Listening, Sonic Intimacy, and the Power of Quiet Voices in Rakhshan Banietemad’s The May Lady: Towards a Cinema of Empathy

This chapter focuses on the variety of ways in which sound plays a pivotal role in The May Lady. Nooshin analyzes the act of listening as portrayed and provoked by the protagonist of the film, examining how the purely sonorous material qualities of the spoken voice, such as timbre, texture, and contour—often presented as being outside of referential meaning—in fact communicate a great deal to the listener “beyond words.” She argues in particular how sounds facilitate a new kind of filmic intimacy, affective subjectivity, and embodied listening that she terms “cinema of empathy.”