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The Dramatic Human Voice in Film Martin Shingler, University of Sunderland, UK

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The Dramatic Human Voice in Film Martin Shingler, University of Sunderland, UK Fasten Your Seatbelts and Prick Up Your Ears: The Dramatic Human Voice in Film Martin Shingler, University of Sunderland, UK 1. Introduction "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" This is one of Bette Davis's finest lines of dialogue, from Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film All About Eve (1950). It is a line delivered by Davis with relish, style and supreme confidence. Her voice is firm and steady, sustaining a deep throaty resonance, husky (not quite croaky), suggestive of weariness, even cynicism. This is the voice of experience. The statement itself comes in two parts. The first advises caution and the second delivers a threat. Consequently, the first part is made up of three relatively long words, producing soft sounds with drawn-out vowels and fricative consonants (f, s), pronounced with a slight drawl and a snide inflection. "Fasten" becomes "festen," the mangled, distorted vowel striking an off note, whilst the sibilance at the end of "seatbelts" produces a hiss, suggestive of a venomous snake. It is all just a little bit twisted, whereas the second part of the line is decidedly bitter. The tone is altogether harsher, the pronunciation more emphatic. Each word of "it's going to be a bumpy night!" is articulated with precision. It produces a more fragmented sound with a jerky (or bumpy) rhythm. Here Davis uses her trademark clipped pronunciation, her upper class New England accent lending her an air of superiority and sophistication. Each word is struck solidly and sharply, with shorter vowels and emphatic consonants, including labials (b, p) nasals (m, n) and a dramatic stop at the end (t or t!). The overall effect of this line is a slow sustained build (creating tension), answered by a dramatic pause (for suspense), and then swiftly followed by a staccato rhythm, punchy and percussive. When the threat is delivered it is rather like being repeatedly poked in the ear, the final emphatic "t" replicating a resounding sharp flick of a finger against the ear. Ouch! It is a magical movie moment: compelling and fascinating; totally unrealistic, totally theatrical, yet totally convincing. Whatever feeling of awkwardness might be caused by the sheer artifice (or, better still, phoniness) of this dialogue is swept away by Davis's commanding performance, her command of body and voice, her conviction in what she is saying and her ability to say it with style. It might not be naturalism but it is credible, pleasurable and most certainly dramatic. As such, it represents simultaneously one of the high points of the movie, of Bette Davis's film career and of classical Hollywood cinema. The ability to deliver a line such as this, in this way and with this affect, marks Davis out as a consummate screen performer: her vocal technique being as polished and pronounced as her physical gestures, bodily movements and facial expressions. All of these are artfully combined to make the line work. Film critics and scholars are becoming increasingly alert to the significance of the film actor's voice. For instance, David Bromwich, writing an appreciation of James Stewart in the London Review of Books in 2002, made the following statement: One thing a casual observer learns to love, if he is going to like Stewart at all, is a kind of stammer that trips in naturally and convincingly – a signature touch he seldom allowed to pass into self-parody until his late fifties. An anomaly almost as emphatic is the frequent decision to speak in a soft voice, always with perfect clarity and conveying a range of available senses for words. Stewart does this often in intimate scenes with women, but not only with them, and it shows the passage from theatre to a broader naturalist domain of feeling that movies uniquely made possible. Even now, when fewer actors bring the wrong kind of theatricality from stage to screen, the freedom to modulate a speaking voice downward is rarely grasped; and if you listen to the better-known stars of the 1930s and 1940s, only a select company of them appear to have glimpsed and taken the opportunity: Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda – were there many more? Even within that group, Stewart is exceptionally resourceful. His voice can be put in the service of feelings as they bubble slowly from confusion to clarity. Or it can be used to signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. (Bromwich, 2002: 3) This statement contains a direct question. It asks the reader to think about all those famous Hollywood stars from the 1930s and 1940s and to identify those who spoke in a specific way: softly but clearly, intimately but so as to be heard perfectly by an audience. This is an invitation to scholars researching classical Hollywood stars to pay careful attention to their voice as well as their image. Increasingly, film critics are doing this, hence the first part of Philip Kemp's Sight & Sound article on Hollywood actor Claude Rains describes the qualities and the genesis of his unforgettable voice, "Rich, throaty, hinting at infinite reserves of sophisticated irony – the voice of reassuring authority or equally of urbane villainy." (Kemp, 2005: 32) More and more, it would seem that film critics and scholars are paying close attention to the subtle cadences and nuances of film voices. They are also recognising the profound consequences of such subtle features when magnified by microphones and speakers, understanding the actor's allure to lie, in part at least, with the sound of their voice. This attention to the voice of actors and stars is partly due to a growing interest in the subject of film sound and an increasing sound consciousness among film writers and scholars. Over the last few years a number of books have been published on film sound and a series of conferences have been devoted to sound. Until recently, the leading publications in English on film sound had been three edited book collections: Elizabeth Weis and John Belton's Film Sound: Theory and Practice (1985), Rick Altman's Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992) and Vincent LoBrutto's Sound-on-Film (1994). The French filmmaker, composer, theorist and critic Michel Chion has played a pioneering role in the development of film sound theory, his book L'Audio-Vision, first published in French in 1990, appeared in English in 1994. The available literature on film sound has recently been supplemented by David Sonnenschein's Sound Design (2001), Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider's edited collection Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001 (2003) and Philip Brophy's 100 Modern Soundtracks (2004). Since 1998, the School of Sound has provided a dedicated forum for sound practitioners, theorists, critics and students from around the world. So far, the School of Sound has organised six symposia (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005). In 2002 and 2004, another forum was held: Sounding Out also brought sound theorists and practitioners together from many different countries in order to exchange ideas, experiences and opinions. These events, combined with a growing roster of dedicated publications and websites (e.g. www.filmsound.org) have been steadily raising the academic profile of film sound over the last few years. One consequence is an increasing interest in aspects of film sound amongst students, resulting in several PhDs, such as Rayna Denison's project on the star voices used for the English language versions of Japanese anime (University of Nottingham) [Editor's note: see Rayna Denison, "Disembodied Stars and the Cultural Meanings of Princess Mononoke's Soundscape" Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, 3 (November 2005) http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=3&id=83]. The use of star voices in animated feature films is gaining increasing interest, prompted partly by the huge commercial success of films such as Toy Story (1995), with the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, and Shrek (2001), with the voices of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy. The voice has become a major area of investigation within the larger field of sound studies and publications, conference papers and PhD projects have been dedicated specifically to the subject of the film voice. For instance, Vicky Lowe (University of Manchester) recently completed a PhD on the British screen actor Robert Donat, concentrating specifically on his vocal technique. Whilst aspects of this work will be published as book chapters in forthcoming publications, Lowe has given several conference papers on this subject, including one at Sounding Out 2 (University of Nottingham, July 2004). Here she explored the subtleties of Donat's subdued vocal style, largely a result of acute asthma, in the film Knight Without Armour (1937). To date, many of the published studies of the voice in film have concentrated largely on dialogue. This has included investigations into the way different styles of dialogue have developed over time and predominated within specific genres (see Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue [2000], and Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames [2001]). But there is much more to the voice than dialogue. The dramatic human voice heard in film does not have to be eloquent or articulate. It may not even be used to articulate words at all. The sounds emitted from the human throat and mouth produce profound and powerful effects when recorded by modern sensitive microphones and reproduced in the sonic playground that is the modern movie theatre (see Sergi 2001). Scholars of film sound are increasingly concerned with how vocal sounds are produced, how they are recorded and reproduced and how audiences respond to them.
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