The Singing Subject

OVERTURE: The Singing Subject Hollywood's soundtrack is engendered through a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin, while establishing the diegetic containment ofthe female voice. 1 In The Acoustic Mirror, one of the few film theory books that considers the female voice in cinema, psychoanalytic film theorist Kaja Silverman ascribes the female voice a place firmly within the narrative of 'classic' Hollywood (and other realist) films. 2 But as a cinematic spectator, I have experienced films where a woman's singing voice has for me transcended such limitations. My first experience of such a feeling was motivated by Songcatcher (Maggie Greenwald, 2000), a story about a 19th century musicologist, Dr Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer), who travels to the Appalachian Mountains to collect folk ballads. In Songcatcher, the women characters' singing is pleasurable and moving, but also transports me emotionally beyond the narrative.3 Such experiences of singing scenes4 provide for me a feeling that is analogous to, but also different from, the 'transcendence' of numbers in classic Hollywood film musicals.s In the classical musical, singing performances are not only expected, because of the genre, but also assisted by the use of nondiegetic music to lift the musical experience beyond the 'real' world of the narrative to a space that is most often a utopian realm. However, in Songcatcher, singing remains of the diegesis and yet for me reaches beyond the narrative world. I Kaja Silverman. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in P5ychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis. Indiana University Press. 1988. p. 45. 2 Silverman extends her discussion to later films Klute (Alan J Pakula. 1971), Blow Out (Brian de Palma. 198 I) and to French film Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1982). 3 Anahid Kassabian reports a similar emotional experience with the singing sequences in A Woman Under The Influence (John Cassavetes. 1974) in Anahid Kassabian. Hearing Film: Tracking Ident{(ications in Contemporary Hollyvv'ood Film A1usic. New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 1. 4 I use the terms 'scene' and 'sequence' interchangeably, following David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's definitions: a scene is a 'segment in a narrative film that takes place in one time and space, or which uses crosscutting to show two or more simultaneous actions' while sequence is 'commonly used for a moderately large segment of a film, involving onc complete stretch of action; in a narrative film, often equivalent to a Scene.' David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 2nd edn, New York. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1989, p. 388. :; By classic or classical musicals. I refer to Hollywood musicals of the 1930s to the 1950s, or those that adhere to such a style. The category ofmusical film is very much a contested one. I define the musical genre in more detail in chapter 1. My experience of singing sequences, where female characters' diegetic singing moves me somehow beyond what might be expected of a realist narrative text, has inspired me to investigate the phenomenon of\vomen's singing voices, especially in contelnporary films that are not classical musicals. My research attends to performances where singing potentially affords other experiences besides containment, and to how singing might influence representations of subjectivity. Particularly where women sing together or for themselves, songs performed are potential 'sites for the negotiation of subjectivities, '6 sometimes functioning in opposition to the narrative trajectory of the protagonist. In this thesis I want to examine such sites to determine whether singing can be a transformative experience for women characters. In doing so I develop the notion of the singing su~iect as a way of understanding representations of subjectivity. I consider whether the act of singing is transgressive or empowering for women characters. I examine how singing relates to women's expression and how singing disrupts or reinforces the unspoken patriarchal hierarchies that dominate communication and women's behaviour. My thesis sets out to consider \vhere and how representations of women singing diegetically open up the opportunity for acoustic authority and communicative potential in terms of expressing subjectivity for worn.en. Drawing on feminist, film and psychoanalytic theory, as well as on aspects of film music theory and formal analysis techniques, and recognising the importance of sound and how it works with images in 'synchresis, '7 I exmnine a number of contemporary films that feature what I argue are significant singing sequences or scenes, and consider how such sequences serve as sites for the negotiation of represented female subjectivities. Singing utilises language, a semiotic system, and music, a meaning-making system to which it is harder to ascribe definite meanings. As such, singing can be conceived 6 I have adapted the phrase from Guthrie P Ramsey, Jr, 'Muzing new hoods, making new identities: film, hip-hop culture, and jazz music,' Calla/oo 25, no. 1,2002, p. 309. I discuss this in more detail in the following chapter. 7 'Synchresis' is a term coined by Michel Chion to describe the way images and sound work together. Michel Chion, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 5. 2 of as a liminal space that successfully negotiates overlapping discourses. I argue that these overlapping discourses, made even more complex when combined with images, are rich sites of investigation. Songs have been characterised in film musicals as stopping the narrative flow, and yet songs are not always a halt on action in narrative films. 8 I explore the diverse domain of the singing subject and consider how her diegetic singing might be operating other than as a way of expressing emotion while the story is suspended. The liminal aural space of the diegetically performed song is evident in a number of films and is one of potential power, sometimes able to subvert the gendered control of language that is suggested by psychoanalytic and feminist film theories. FEMALE VOICES IN FILM Silverman identifies the different relationships that male and female subjects have to language: while"[b]oth are spoken by discourses and desires which exceed them,' the male has a more powerful relation to language.9 The male can take up a position in film representations as a speaking subject, exemplified by the position of extradiegetic narrator. The female voice, however, is subject to three operations that serve to 'reinscribe her into the narrative.' 10 The female voice is 'doubly diegeticized' in "what is overtly indicated as an inner textual space, such as a painting, a song-and-dance performance, or a filnl-within-a-film. '11 Or, in films where the female voice is required to speak involuntarily, what Silverman calls the "talking cure,' she is anchored to a 'fantasmatic interiority.'12 Lastly, "Hollywood reinscribes the opposition between diegetic interiority and exteriority into the narrative itself by depositing the female body into the female voice in the guise of accent, speech 8 Both Laura Mulvey and Claudia Gorbman characterise songs' functions as distinct from the action of the film. See Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 19-20, and Laura Mulvey, 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,' in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. 1990, p. 33. 9 Kaja Silverman, 'Dis-embodying the female voice,' in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, cd. Patricia Erens. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 309. 10 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 56. II Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 59. 3 impediment, timbre or "grain".' 13 Acoustic authority is achieved for Silverrnan only through the nonsynchronisation found in experimental feminist cinema, where women's voices are separated from bodies. 14 While Silverman's work is compelling, and remains extremely influential, her description of containment does not seem to fully explain the effects that singing women in film can produce in contemporary films. Sequences where singing women characters have an impact on the narrative, and where women exhibit power through the use of singing, at times offer a different perspective to Silverman's notions surrounding women and voice in cinema. Many powerful singing sequences are largely neglected or ignored both in commercial and academic considerations of films in comparison to visual and other elements. There is a need to develop alternative methods of making sense of singing sequences. My thesis explores a variety of singing scenes that I argue enable communication and expression for female characters that is potentially transformative or empowering. A singing sequence can subvert the conception of a female voice always being contained within the diegesis, when an embodied voice creates a different kind of singing space during performance. My thesis asks in what ways representations of singing can be understood as offering a potentially powerful way of 'speaking' for female representation. The neglect of singing sequences is to be expected for a number ofintertwined reasons. There is a continued dominance of vision in the taken-for-granted 'hierarchy of the senses,' \S and most usually a parallel dominance of emphasis on the visual in academic theorising and 13 Ibid .. p. 61. 14

Load more