Chapter 4 Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Body in Beckett’s Eh Joe
Svetlana Antropova
1 Introduction
The television play, Eh Joe, first recorded in 1966, was first broadcast by BBC2 with Jack MacGowran as Joe, and Sian Phillips as Voice. At least thirteen ver- sions of this play have been preserved on tape making it Beckett’s most repro- duced teleplay. Eh Joe is practically staged in the dark cellar of Joe’s mind. MacGrowan de- fines this play as ‘the most gruelling twenty-two minutes I have ever had in my life’, and later he writes that ‘It’s really photographing the mind. It’s the nearest perfect play for television that you could come across, because the television camera photographs the mind better than anything else’.1 The camera performs the role of an all-seeing eye zooming in between the Voice’s speeches through- out the film, and at the end, the camera slowly dollies in to a close-up of Joe’s face. Jeanette Malkin writes that ‘this short film sets up a context and frame for the study of obsessive introspection of unwilled memory’.2 Samuel Beck- ett manages to scan the mind through unusual television devices: complete separation of camera and voice, limitation of the versatility of the camera, invisibility of the voice owner, partial inaudibility of words towards the end, and the photogenicity of an intensely listening face.3 Based on the principle of silent movies with a soundtrack of a woman’s voice added, Eh Joe records Joe’s silence and achieves complete vocacentricity. The screening, though simple in nature, reveals a very complex relation between the three presumably autono- mous objects: gaze/camera, the voice and the body/Joe. As a result, a shift from the signifier to the signified causes the character/body to become a sheer re- cipient for the flow of memory: Joe is transformed into a mere listener to a dis- embodied voice. Consequently, traumatic memory becomes the protagonist of
1 Ibid., 538. 2 Jeannette R. Malkin, Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama (Ann Harbour: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 37. 3 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 293.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004385931_005
2 Disembodied Voices
Disembodied voices and voiceless characters become frequent entities/char- acters in Beckett’s plays, such as in Not I, Ohio Impromptu, That Time and so on. Although counterparts, they hint at the possibility of a unity, as the body normally houses a voice, and the audience always want to identify a disembod- ied voice and attach it to a certain body. But Samuel Beckett never fully grants this wish since no ‘host’ body appears on stage or in the film, voices function as autonomous entities. Obviously, a distinction emerges between a disembodied voice in the theatre and a disembodied voice in the cinema. One-directional, a bodiless voice in the theatre comes from a loudspeaker, that is, from one place, whereas in a film a disembodied voice tends to occupy all sonic space onscreen as well as off-screen: ‘Cinema has a frame, whose edges are visible, we can see where the frame leaves off and off-screen space starts’.4 A voice, therefore, be- longs to both spaces while an image always stays in a frame, which certainly creates dramatic tension, as no trace exists of the initial relation that links the voice to the image.
Being in the screen and not, wandering the surface of the screen with- out entering it, the acoustmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension. He invites the spectator to go see, and he can be an invitation to the loss of self, to desire and fascination.5
In her analysis of the film The Attack, Tarraf gives a very interesting example of acoustmêtre – the phone call from Sihem before committing suicide bomb- ing. The call also replayed at the end of the film serves not only as a trauma trigger, but as a framing device as well. The ghost voice of a person no longer alive haunts Amin as he is trying to work through traumatic loss. Sihem’s voice though acoustmêtre still has a body through the images of her projected in the movie. The voice in Eh Joe, on the other hand, functions as a complete acoustmêtre, namely a voice acting as an acoustic presence, not connected to
4 Michael Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 22. 5 Ibid., 24.